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EDITOR'S PREFACE. 



It is not the function of annotation to take away from 
the student the pleasure of finding out for himself the full 
beauty of half-hidden allusion and happy illustration in 
the text. But the average high school student has access 
to few books of reference, and without the aid of notes 
to such a text as Sesame and Lilies he is sure to pass 
unheeding the delicate blossoms of fantasy and figure, 
gathered from the world-old garden of beautiful thoughts. 
" The ethereal Euskin " must be read understandingly or 
not at all. And no author is more replete with others- 
thoughts, absorbed in the chrysalis state, and reembodied 
with wings. The two lectures called collectively Sesame 
and Lilies were written soon after the great turning-point 
in Ruskin's life, when he had come to believe that the 
reason why the English people could not appreciate beauti- 
ful art was because English life failed to develop beautiful 
characters. He has given this idea such noble expression 
in these lectures that they will always rank, not only as 
his finest pieces of writing, but as specimens of the highest 
development of modern prose. 

The student will find in the notes a number of quotations 
from Unto this Last and from others of Ruskin's writings, 

5 



6 EDITOR S PREFACE. 

which serve better than any editing to interpret their 
brother paragraphs in Sesame and Lilies. 

It is suggested that the best way to read these two lec- 
tures on *' Books and Women," as Professor Norton puts it, 
is to read them first with only the aid of the understanding 
sympathy which one's own mind may furnish. If the stu- 
dent finds this sufficient, well and good. But let him then 
look through the notes for postscripts from the other works ; 
and if he chances upon a word that makes brighter one of 
those multitudinous " side lights of allusion," the editor's 
purpose will be justified. 

It is with pleasure that acknowledgment is made to Pro- 
fessor Charles Eliot Norton of Cambridge, Mr. W. G. 
Collingwood of Brantwood, Coniston, England, Mr. James 
P. Smart, Jr., Secretary of the Euskin Society in London, 
MissVida D. Scudder of Wellesley College, Professor Myra 
Reynolds of the University of Chicago, and the Rev. Emil 
G. Hirsch and Mr. Edward Manley, of Chicago, for helpful 
suggestions upon difficult points in the text. 

A. S. C. 

De Kalb, Illinois, August, 1900. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



John Euskin was born in London, February 8, 1819, 
and died at Brantwood, Coniston, January 20, 1900. 

His parents were Scotch. His biographer says : " The 
religious instinct so conspicuous in him is an inheritance 
from Scotland;" and again: ''The combination of shrewd 
common sense and romantic sentiment ; the oscillation 
between levity and dignity, from caustic jest to tender 
earnest ; the restlessness, the fervor, the impetuosity, — 
all these are characteristics of a Scotsman of parts, and 
highly developed in Ruskin." 

His rather isolated boyhood was passed in quiet study, 
under his mother's tutorship ; and it is because of those 
long winter mornings spent with her that his writings are 
full to the brim of biblical phrase and thought. She made 
him read the Bible through, word by word, at least once 
a year, and he committed many chapters to memory. 
"And truly," he says in Prceterita, his autobiography, 
" though I have picked up a little further knowledge in 
later life, and owe not a little to the teaching of many 
people, this maternal installation of my mind in that prop- 
erty of chapters, I count very confidently the most pre- 
cious, and, on the whole, the one essential part of all my 
education." 

7 



8 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

The monotony of the boy's lessons was varied for him in 
the summer by the delightful annual excursions which the 
whole family made, driving in an old-fashioned travelling 
coach over the hills and dales of England, for the purpose 
of taking orders for the father's business. Mr. John James 
Ruskin was a manufacturer and importer of Spanish wines. 
It was on these summer tours that John Ruskin, aged 
seven, began to write descriptions of hills, clouds, valleys, 
and people. He kept a journal and put down everything 
he saw with his joyous child's eyes and his wonderfully 
mature imagination, "It is not possible to imagine," he 
says, " a more blessed entrance into life for a child of such 
a temperament as mine. True, the temperament belonged 
to the age : a very few years before that, no child could 
have been born to care for mountains, or for the men 
that lived among them, in that way. Till Rousseau's time, 
there had been no ' sentimental ' love of nature ; and till 
Scott's, no such apprehensive love of 'all sorts and condi- 
tions of men,' not in the soul merely, but in the flesh. 
For me, the Alps and their people were alike beautiful in 
their snow and their humanity; and I Avanted, neither for 
them nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the 
rocks, or of any spirits in heaven but the clouds." These 
are thoughts that dominated his mind for the greater part 
of his life, and constantly found expression in his writings. 

Peacefully, then, his boyhood days went by, with lessons 
learned and childish poems written in the winters, and 
pleasant journeying and sketching from nature in the sum- 
mers, — for the boy's talents were developing rapidly. 

When he was fourteen, a friend gave him a copy of 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. \) 

Rogers's Italy, with illustrations by J. M. W. Turner. 
Then and there began his lifelong devotion to the great 
landscape painter, to defend whose methods of work 
against hostile criticism he wrote the first volumes of his 
best known book, 3Iodern Painters. Volume I. was pub- 
lished in 1842, when Ruskin was twenty-three years old. 
Between 1833 and 1842, he had done the necessary tutor- 
ing, entered, and taken his B. A. degree at Christ Church 
College, Oxford University. While there he had won a 
prize by writing a poem, and had found time, also, for 
other poems and essays, and for lessons in painting from 
Copley, Fielding, and Harding, in addition to his work in 
the University. 

Modern Painters attracted great attention at once, be- 
cause of its brilliant style and its original theories of art, 
which disregarded the conventional rules followed by the 
old masters and accepted by all critics until that time. 
The book established Ruskin's reputation as an art critic, 
and revolutionized public opinion in England upon ques- 
tions of art. 

Immediately after the appearance of Volume I. of 
Modern Painters, Ruskin spent several years abroad, 
chiefly devoted to the study of art in Italy, in prepara- 
tion for succeeding volumes of the book then expanding 
in his mind into the discursive treatise on art which 
he made it. During the years before 18G0 he did an 
enormous amount of studying, .writing (see the list of his 
works), and lecturing. In 1858 he was appointed professor 
in the Cambridge School of Art. These were the years 
when the fame of the young and brilliant author of Modern 



10 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

Painters was at its height. But about 1860 a distinct 
change began to make itself manifest in his studies, his 
literary style, and his whole thought of life. The gospel 
that he had preached until now had been the love of beauty. 
To him the mechanical civilization of the day, — the ad- 
miration for the newly discovered power of machinery, and 
for its cheapened products, was ugly, false, and degrading. 
He had tried to get away from it, and to lead those who 
would follow to the far fields of art, and the nearer fields 
and hills and skies of nature, in search of the beauty that 
he had always found and loved there. But slowly he 
began to see that he was merely "lecturing" to a polite 
world that applauded his wonderful way of saying things, 
called it "inspiring," and then forgot what he had said. 
He saw that in order to make English life beautiful, he 
must first make it right ; a task, indeed, for one man. So 
he began with the common people, talking and writing to 
them with great earnestness, about the matters with which 
they had to deal in their lives. Unjust competition, the 
misery of the poor, the relations of capital and labor, the 
true nature and meaning of wealth, and other questions 
which the political economy of the day (the thought of 
John Stuart Mill and others) treated in a manner that 
seemed to him radically wrong, — all these were discussed 
in Unto this Last, Munera Pulveris, Fors Clavigera: 
Monthly Letters to the Workmen and Laborers of Great 
Britain. And in discussing them, his beautiful, pictu- 
resque style became strong, terse, and plain, though still 
capable of flashing out again when he was stirred by the 
sight of a wrong. " All political economy founded on self- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 11 

interest," he declared, was " but the fulfilment of that 
which once brought schism into the policy of the angels, 
and ruin into the economy of heaven." '' There is nothing 
going on among us," wrote Carlyle to Emerson, " so notable 
as those fierce lightning bolts Ruskin is copiously and des- 
perately pouring into the black world of anarchy around 
him. Ko other man has in him the divine rage against 
iniquity, falsity, and baseness, that Ruskin has, and every 
man ought to have." 

But the impassioned language which he sometimes em- 
ployed, together with the startling theories and projects he 
advanced, shocked and annoyed those people who had 
revered him as an interpreter of the beautiful in nature 
and art, but who could not consider him as a political 
economist. Workingmen rallied around him, but many of 
his old friends fell away. Oxford, however, remained true. 
He was elected Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1869 and 
kept the professorship until 1879, when he resigned, partly 
on account of a misunderstanding with the authorities, 
partly because his health was breaking. In 1883 he was 
called back to Oxford and held the same professorship two 
years more. But there were whispers, to which his illness 
lent a show of truth, that he had lost his mental balance; 
and from 1860, for twenty years, he fought against the 
most exasperating of obstacles, — public ridicule. Never- 
theless, he made no shadow of turning, and it is undeniable 
that his ideas have at last influenced present economic 
thought. His most recent biographer * says : '' It was one 
of the crowning and closing glories of Ruskin's life — at 
* M. H. Spielmann : John Buskin, p. 31. 



12 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

once his delight and consolation — that in more recent times 
thinkers have come to accept many of his theories once 
spurned or rejected, and the public to receive them as 
truths." The Guild of St. George, the embodiment of his 
socialistic ideas, lives a struggling life in England to-day. 
But whatever unsuccessful experiments he may have made, 
the heart and purpose of the man have always been sin- 
cere, reverent, and true. The spirit of the times cried to 
him, and he answered with the best he had to give, — 
thirty years' devotion of a nature too strenuous and ardent 
for its physical frame to bear. 

His own summation of his life-work is given in Fors 
Clavigera, Volume VII. : — 

^^ Modern Painters taught the claim of all lower nature 
on the hearts of men : of the rock, and wave, and herb, as 
a part of their necessary spirit life ; in all that I now bid 
you to do, to dress the earth and keep it, I am fulfilling 
what I then began. The Stones of Venice taught the laws 
of constructive art, and the dependence of all human work 
or edifice for its beauty on the happy life of the workman. 
Unto this Last taught the laws of that life itself, and its 
dependence on the Sun of Justice. The inaugural Oxford 
lectures taught the necessity that the happy life of the 
workman should be led, and the gracious laws of beauty 
and labor recognized, by the upper no less than the lower 
classes of England. Sesame and Lilies is a part of this 
gospel. And lastly, For^s Clavigera has declared the relation 
of these classes to each other, and the only possible con- 
ditions of peace and honor, for low and high, rich and 
poor, together, in the holding of that first estate, under 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 13 

the only Despot, God, from which whoso falls, angel or 
man, is kept, not mythically nor disputably, but here in 
visible horror of chains under darkness to the judgment 
of the great day; and in keeping which service is perfect 
freedom, and inheritance of all that a loving Creator can 
give to his creatures, and an immortal Father to his 
children. 

" This, then, is the message which, knowing no more as 
I unfolded the scroll of it what next would be written there 
than the blade of grass knows what the form of its fruit 
shall be, I have been led on, year by year, to speak, even to 
this its end." 

"John Ruskin's message, repeated in a thousand forms, 
is one message — never altered and never retreated from — 
goodness is more than gold, and character outweighs in- 
tellect." * 

For his teaching, which helps us to know what is beauti- 
ful and to do good; for the noble English in which he 
clothed that teaching; and for the conception which his 
pure and earnest mind has given us of a social life in 
which beauty shall be not only a joy forever but "a joy 
for a//," it is right that we should reverence and love the 
memory of John Rusk in. 

A. S. C. 

* N. D. Hillis : Great Books as Life Teachers, p. 42. 



A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE MORE 
IMPORTANT WORKS OF JOHN RUSKIN. 



The Poetry of Architecture. Essays published in the Architectural 

Magazine, 1837-1839. Signed, Kata Phusin ("According to Nature." 

The phrase describes his point of view). 
Modern Painters, "Vol. I. 1843. 
Modern Painters, Vol. II. 1846. 

The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 1849. [Exodus xxv. 37.] 
Pre-Raphaelitism. 1851. 
The Stones of Venice. 1851-1853. 
Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds. [On the duties of officers of 

the Church.] 
Lectures on Architecture. 1853. 
Modern Painters, Vol. III. 1856. 
Modern Painters, Vol. IV. 1856. 
The Political Economy of Art. 1857. [Afterwards published as A 

Joy Forever.] 
The Elements of Drawing. 1857. 
The Two Paths. Lectures on Art and its Application to Decoration 

and Manufacture. 
Poems. Collected 1859. 
Modern Painters, Vol. V. 1860. 
Unto this Last. Four Essays on the First Principles of Political 

Economy. 1860. [Matthew xx. 14.] 
Munera Pulveris. Six Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy. 

1863. [Horace, Odes, I. xxviii. 3.] 
Sesame and Lilies. 1865. 

Ethics of the Dust. Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Ele- 
ments of Crystallization. 1865. [Ethical and sociological essays.] 
Crown of Wild Olive. [That is, the reward of human work.] 1866. 

Three Lectures on Work, Traffic, and War. 
Time and Tide. Twenty-five Letters to a Working-Man on the 

Laws of Work. 1867. 

15 



16 CHRONOLOGICAL LIST — SUGGESTED READING. 

Queen of the Air. A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and 

Storm. 1860. 
Lectures on Art, delivered at the University of Oxford. 1870. 
Fors Clavigera. [That is, the nail-forging destiny, or lot in life.] 

Monthly Letters to the Laborers of Great Britain. 1871-1878. 
Aratra Pentelici. [Altars of Pentelicus, a mountain in Greece, famous 

for its marble.] Lectures on Greek Relief-Sculpture. 
The Eagle's Nest. On the Relation of Natural Science to Art. 1872. 
Ariadne Florentina. Lectures on Engraving. [Allusion to engraved 

labyrinthine ornament. See Classical Dictionary.] 1872. 
Proserpina. Studies of Wayside Flowers. 1876. 
Deucalion. Studies of Waves and Stones. 1878. 
Mornings in Florence. [Christian Art for English Travellers.] 1877. 
St. Mark's Rest. History of Venice. 1877. 
The Laws of Ffisole. 1878. [Elementary principles of drawing and 

painting.] 
The Art of England. Oxford Lectures. 1884. 
The Pleasures of England. Oxford Lectures. 1885. 
Our Fathers have told Us. Sketches of the History of Christendom 

for Boys and Girls. Part I, The Bible of Amiens. 1885. 
Praeterita. Scenes from My Past Life. 1887. 



SUGGESTED READING. 

Prasterita, Autobiography, 1887. 

Life of John Ruskin, W. G. Collingwood. 2 vols, illus., Houghton, 

Mifflin & Co., 1898. 
John Ruskin, His Life and Teaching, R. J. Mather. Ed. 5, Warne, 1897. 
The Work of John Ruskin, Charles Waldstein. Methuen, 1894. 
Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning, Mrs. Anne Thackeray 

Ritchie, illus.. Harper, 1899. 
Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great, Elbert Hubbard, 

Roycroft Press, 1899. 
Poets and Problems, G. W. Cooke, Ticknor, 1886. 
Lessons from My Masters, Peter Bayne, J. Clarke, 1879. 
Great Books as Life Teachers, N. D. Hillis, Revell, 1898. 
John Ruskin, M. H. Spielmann, illus., Lippincott, 1900. 
The Works of John Ruskin, authorized American edition, edited by 

Charles Eliot Norton, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 



PREFACE TO THE SMALL EDITION OF 1882. 



The present edition of " Sesame and Lilies," issued at the 
request of an aged friend, is reprinted without change of a 
word from the first small edition of the book, withdrawing 
only the irrelevant preface respecting tours in the Alps, 
which however if the reader care to see, he will find placed 
with more propriety in the second volume of "Deucalion." 
The third lecture, added in the first volume of the large 
edition of my works, and the gossiping introduction pre- 
fixed to that edition, are withdrawn also, not as irrelevant, 
but as following the subject too far, and disturbing the sim- 
plicity in which the two original lectures dwell on their 
several themes, — the majesty of the influence of good 
books, and of good women, if we know how to read them, 
and how to honor. 

I might just as well have said, the influence of good men, 
and good women, since the best strength of a man is shown 
in his intellectual work, as that of a woman in her daily 
deed and character ; and I am somewhat tempted to involve 
myself in the debate wliich might be imagined in illustrat- 
ing these relations of their several powers, because only the 
other day one of my friends put me in no small pet by say- 
ing that he thought my own influence was much more in 
being amiable and obliging than in writing books. Admit- 

17 



18 PREFACE. 

ting, for the argument's sake, the amiableness and obliging- 
ness, I begged him, with some warmth, to observe that there 
were myriads of at least equally good-natured people in the 
world who had merely become its slaves, if not its victims, 
but that the influence of my books was distinctly on the 
increase, and I hoped — etc., etc. ^ it is no matter what 
more I said, or intimated ; but it much matters that the 
young reader of the following essays should be confirmed 
in the assurance on which all their pleading depends, that 
there is such a thing as essential good, and as essential evil, 
in books, in art, and in character; — that this essential good- 
ness and badness are independent of epochs, fashions, opin- 
ions, or revolutions ; and that the present extremely active 
and ingenious generation of young people, in thanking 
Providence for the advantages it has granted them in the 
possession of steam whistles and bicycles, need not hope 
materially to add to the laws of beauty in sound or grace 
in motion, which were acknowledged in the days of Orpheus, 
and of Camilla. 

But I am brought to more serious pause than I had antici- 
pated in putting final accent on the main sentences in this 
— already, as men now count time, old — book of mine, 
because since it was written, not only these untried instru- 
ments of action, but many equally novel methods of educa- 
tion and systems of morality have come into vogue, not 
without a certain measure of prospective good in them ; — 
college education for women, — out-of-college education for 
men : positivism with its religion of humanity, and nega- 
tivism with its religion of Chaos, — and the like, from the 
entanglement of which no young people can now escape, if 



li 



PREFACE. 19 

they would ; together with a mass of realistic, or material- 
istic, literature and art, founded mainly on the theory of 
nobody's having any will, or needing any master ; much of 
it extremely clever, irresistibly amusing, and enticingly 
pathetic ; but which is all nevertheless the mere whirr and 
dust-cloud of a dissolutely reforming and vulgarly manu- 
facturing age, which when its dissolutions are appeased, 
and its manufactures purified, must return in due time to 
the understanding of the things that have been, and are, 
and shall be hereafter, though for the present concerned 
seriously with nothing beyond its dinner and its bed. 

I must therefore, for honesty's sake, no less than intel- 
ligibility's, warn the reader of " Sesame and Lilies," that 
the book is wholly of the old school ; that it ignores, with- 
out contention or regret, the ferment of surrounding ele- 
ments, and assumes for perennial some old-fashioned 
conditions and existencies which the philosophy of to-day 
imagines to be extinct with the Mammoth and the Dodo. 

Thus the second lecture, in its very title, " Queens' 
Gardens," takes for granted the persistency of Queenship, 
and therefore of Kingship, and therefore of Courtliness 
or Courtesy, and therefore of Uncourtliness or Rusticity. 
It assumes, with the ideas of higher and lower rank, 
those of serene authority and happy submission ; of Riches 
and Poverty without dispute for their rights, and of Vir- 
tue and Vice without confusion of their natures. 

And farther, it must be premised that the book is 
chiefly written for young people belonging to the upper, 
or undistressed middle, classes ; who may be supposed to 
have choice of the objects and command of the industries 



'20 I'REFACE* 

of their life. It assumes that many of them will be 
called to occupy responsible positions in the world, and 
that they have leisure, in preparation for these, to play 
tennis, or to read Plato. 

Therefore also — that they have Plato to read if they 
choose, with lawns on which they may run, and woods 
in which they may muse. It supposes their father's 
library to be open to them, and to contain all that is 
necessary for their intellectual progress, without the 
smallest dependence on monthly parcels from town. 

These presupposed conditions are not extravagant in 
a country which boasts of its wealth, and which, without 
boasting, still presents in the greater number of its landed 
households, the most perfect types of grace and peace 
which can be found in Europe. 

I have only to add farther, respecting the book, that 
it was written while my energies were still unbroken, and 
my temper unfettered ^ ; and that, if read in connection 
with " Unto this Last," it contains the chief truths I have 
endeavored through all my past life to display, and which, 
iinder the warnings I have received to prepare for its close, 
I am chiefly thankful to have learnt and taught. 

AvALLON, August 24th, 1882. 



1 Uuf retted. Wrougly printed from 1871 ed. 



i 



SESAME AND LILIES, 

LECTURE I. — SESAME.i 

OF kings' treasuries. 

" You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound." 

LuciAN : The Fisherman. 

1. My first duty this evening is to ask your pardon for 
the ambiguity of title under which the subject of lecture 
has been announced : for indeed I am not going to talk of 
kings, known as regnant, nor of treasuries, understood to 
cbntain wealth ; but in quite another order of royalty, and 5 
another material of riches, than those usually acknowledged. 
I had even intended to ask your attention for a little while 
on trust, and (as sometimes one contrives, in taking a friend 
to see a favorite piece of scenery) to hide what I wanted 
most to show, with such imperfect cunning as I might, until 10 
we unexpectedly reached the best point of view by winding 
paths. But — and as also I have heard it said, by men 
practised in public address, that hearers are never so much 
fatigued as by the endeavor to follow a speaker who gives 
them no clue to his purpose, — I will take the slight mask 15 
off at once, and tell you plainly that I want to speak to you 
about the treasures hidden in books ; and about the way we 
find them, and the way we lose them. A grave subject, you 
will say ; and a wide one ! Yes ; so wide that I shall make 
no effort to touch the compass of it. I will try only to 20 

21 



22 SESAME AND LILIES. 

bring before you a few simple thoughts about reading, 
which press themselves upon me every day more deeply, as 
I watch the course of the public mind with respect to our 
daily enlarging means of education ; and the answeringly 
5 wider spreading on the levels, of the irrigation of litera- 
ture. 

2. It happens that I have practically some connection 
with schools for different classes of youth; and I receive 
many letters from parents respecting the education of their 

10 children. In the mass of these letters I am always struck 
by the precedence which the idea of a " position in life " 
takes above all other thoughts in the parents' — more espe- 
cially in the mothers' — minds. " The education befitting 
such and such a station in life " — this is the phrase, this 

15 the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can make 
out, an education good in itself ; even the conception of 
abstract lightness in training rarely seems reached by the 
writers. But, an education " which shall keep a good coat on 
my son's back ; — which shall enable him to ring with confi- 

2odence the visitor's bell at double-belled doors ; which shall 
result ultimately in the establishment of a double-belled door 
to his own house ; — in a word, which shall lead to advance- 
ment in life ; — this we pray for on bent knees — and this is 
all we pray for." It never seems to occur to the parents 

25 that there may be an education which, in itself, is advance- 
ment in Life ; — that any other than that may perhaps be 
advancement in Death; and that this essential education 
might be more easily got, or given, than they fancy, if they 
set about it in the right way ; while it is for no price, and 

30 by no favor, to be got, if they set about it in the Avrong. 

3. Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective 
in the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the first 
— at least that which is confessed with the greatest frank- 
ness, and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful 

35 exertion — is this of " Advancement in life." May I ask you 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 23 

to consider with me, what this idea practically includes, 
and what it should include ? 

Practically, then, at present, " advancement in life " means, 
becoming conspicuous in life ; obtaining a position which 
shall be acknowledged by others to be respectable or honor- 5 
able. We do not understand by this advancement, in gen- 
eral, the mere making of money, but the being known to 
have made it ; not the accomplishment of any great aim, 
but the being seen to liave accomplished it. In a word, we 
mean the gratification of our thirst for applause. That 10 
thirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first 
infirmity of weak ones ; and, on the whole, the strongest 
impulsive influence of average humanity : the greatest 
efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of 
praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure. 15 

4. I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I 
want you only to feel how it lies at the root of effort ; espe- 
cially of all modern effort. It is the gratification of vanity 
which is, with us, the stimulus of toil and balm of repose ; 
so closely does it touch the very springs of life that the 20 
wounding of our vanity is always spoken of (and truly) as 
in its measure mortal ; we call it " mortification," using the 
same expression which we should apply to a gangrenous and 
incurable bodily hurt. And although a few of us may be 
physicians enough to recognize the various effect of this pas- 25 
sion upon health and energy, I believe most honest men 
know, and would at once acknowledge, its leading power with 
them as a motive. The seaman does not commonly desire 
to be made captain only because he knows he can manage the 
ship better than any other sailor on board. He wants to be 30 
made captain that he may be colled captain. The clergyman 
does not usually want to be made a bishop only because he 
believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the 
diocese through its difficulties. He wants to be made bishop 
primarily that he may be called " My Lord." And a prince 35 



24 SESAME AND LILIES. 

does not usually desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a 
kingdom, because lie believes that no one else can as well 
serve the State, upon its throne ; but, briefly, because he 
wishes to be addressed as " Your Majesty," by as many lips 

5 as may be brought to such utterance. 

5. This, then, being the main idea of '^ advancement in 
life," the force of it applies, for all of us, according to our 
station, particularly to that secondary result of such advance- 
ment which we call '' getting into good society." We want 

10 to get into good society not that we may have it, but that 
we may be seen in it ; and our notion of its goodness depends 
primarily on its conspicuousness. 

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what 
I fear you may think an impertinent question ? I never can 

15 go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my audi- 
ence are either with me or against me : I do not much care 
which, in beginning ; but I must know where they are ; and 
I would fain find out, at this instant, whether you think I 
am putting the motives of popular action too low. I am 

20 resolved, to-night, to state them low enough to be admitted 
as probable ; for whenever, in my writings on Political Econ- 
omy, I assume that a little honesty, or generosity, — or 
what used to be called " virtue " — may be calculated upon 
as a human motive of action, people always answer me, say- 

25 ing, " You must not calculate on that : that is not in human 
nature : you must not assume anything to be common to men 
but acquisitiveness and jealousy ; no other feeling ever has 
influence on them, except accidentally, and in matters out 
of the way of business." I begin, accordingly, to-night low 

30 in the scale of motives ; but I must know if you think me 
right in doing so. Therefore, let me ask those who admit 
the love of praise to be usually the strongest motive in 
men's minds in seeking advancement, and the honest desire 
of "doing any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, 

35 to hold up their hands. (About a dozen hands held up — the 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 25 

audience, partly, not being sure the lecturer is serious, and, 
partly, shy of expressi)ig opiiiioa.) I am quite serious — I 
really do want to know what you think ; however, I can 
judge by putting the reverse question. AVill those who 
think that duty is generally the first, and love of praise the 5 
second, motive, hold up their hands ? (O/ie hand reported 
to have been held up, behind the lecturer.) Very good : I see 
you are with me, and that you think I have not begun too 
near the ground. Now, without teasing you by putting 
farther question, I venture to assume that you will admit lo 
duty as at least a secondary or tertiary motive. You think 
that the desire of doing something useful, or obtaining some 
real good, is indeed an existent collateral idea, though a 
secondary one, in most men's desire of advancement. You 
will grant that moderately honest men desire place and 15 
office, at least in some measure, for the sake of beneficent 
power ; and Avould wish to associate rather wath sensible 
and well-informed persons than with fools and ignorant per- 
sons, whether they are seen in the com})any of the sensible 
ones or not. And finally, without being troubled by repeti- 20 
tion of any common truisms about the preciousness of friends, 
and the influence of companions, you will admit, doubtless, 
that according to tlie sincerity of our desire that our friends 
may be true, and our companions wise, — and in proportion 
to the earnestness and discretion with which we choose 25 
both, will be the general chances of our happiness and use- 
fulness. 

6. But granting that we had both the will and the sense 
to choose our friends well, how few of us have the power ! 
or, at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice ! 30 
Nearly all our associations are determined by chance, or 
necessity ; and restricted within a narrow circle. We can- 
not know whom we would ; and those whom we know, we 
cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the 
higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, 35 



26 SESAME AND LILIES. 

only momentarily and partially open. We may, by good 
fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the 
sound of his voice ; or put a question to a man of science, 
and be answered good-hum oredly. We may intrude ten 

5 minutes' talk on a cabinet minister, answered probably with 
words worse than silence, being deceptive ; or snatch, once 
or twice in our lives, the privilege of throwing a bouquet in 
the path of a Princess, or arresting the kind glance of a 
Queen. And yet these momentary chances we covet ; and 

10 spend our years, and passions and powers in pursuit of 
little more than these ; while, meantime, there is a society 
continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long 
as we like, whatever our rank or occupation ; — talk to us 
in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest 

15 their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous 
and so gentle, and can be kept waiting round us all day 
long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to 
grant audience, but to gain it ! — in those plainly furnished 
and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make 

20 no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a 
word they would say, all day long ! 

7. You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, 
that the apathy with which we regard this company of the 
noble, who are praying us to listen to them ; and the passion 

25 with which we pursue the company, probably of the ignoble, 
who despise us, or who have nothing to teach us, are 
grounded in this, — that we can see the faces of the living 
men, and it is themselves, and not their sayings, with which 
we desire to become familiar. But it is not so. Suppose you 

30 never were to see their faces : — suppose you could be put 
behind a screen in the statesman's cabinet, or the prince's 
chamber, would you not be glad to listen to their words, 
though you were forbidden to advance beyond the screen ? 
And when the screen is only a little less, folded in two 

35 instead of f our^ and you can be hidden behind the cover of 



I 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 27 

the two boards that bind a book, and listen all day long, 
not to the casual talk, but to the studied, determined, 
chosen addresses of the wisest of men; — this station of 
audience, and honorable privy council, you despise ! 

8. But perhaps you will say that it is because the living 5 
people talk of things that are passing, and are of immediate 
interest to you, that you desire to hear them. Nay ; that 
cannot be so, for the living people will themselves tell you 
about passing matters, much better in their writings than 
in their careless talk. But I admit that this motive does 10 
influence you, so far as you prefer those rapid and ephemeral 
writings to slow and enduring Avritings — books, properly so 
called. For all books are divisible into two classes : the 
books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this , 
distinction — it is not one of quality only. It is not merely 15 
the bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. 
It is a distinction of species. There are good books for 
the hour, and good ones for all time ; bad books for the 
hour, and bad ones for all time. I must define the two 
kinds before I go farther. 20 

9. The good book of the hour, then, — I do not speak of 
the bad ones, — is simply the useful or pleasant talk of 
some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, 
printed for you. Very useful often, telling you what you 
need to know; very pleasant often, as a sensible friend's 25 
present talk would be. These bright accounts of travels ; 
good-humored and witty discussions of question ; lively or 
pathetic story -telling in the form of novel ; firm fact-telling, 
by the real agents concerned in the events of passing his- 
tory ; — all these books of the hour, multiplying among us 30 
as education becomes more general, are a peculiar possession 
of the present age : we ought to be entirely thankful for 
them, and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no 
good use of them. But we make the worst possible use if 
we allow them to usurp the place of true books : for, strictly 35 



28 SESAME AND LILIES. 

speaking, they are not books at all, but merely letters or 
newspapers in good print. Our friend's letter may be 
delightful, or necessary, to-day : whether worth keeping or 
not, is to be considered. The newspaper may be entirely 

5 proper at breakfast-time, but assuredly it is not reading 
for all day. So, though bound up in a volume, the long 
letter which gives you so pleasant an account of the inns, 
and roads, and weather last year at such a place, or which 
tells you that amusing story, or gives you the real circum- 

10 stances of such and such events, however valuable for occa- 
sional reference, may not be, in the real sense of the word, 
a " book " at all, nor in the real sense, to be " read." A 
book is essentially not a talked thing, but a written thing ; 
and written, not with a view of mere communication, but of 

15 permanence. The book of talk is printed only because its 
author cannot speak to thousands of people at once ; if he 
could, he would — the volume is mere midtiplication of his 
voice. You cannot talk to your friend in India; if you 
could, you would ; you write instead : that is mere convey- 

20 ance of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the 
voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. 
The author has something to say which he perceives to be 
true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, 
no one has yet said it ; so far as he knows, no one else can 

25 say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melodiously if he 
may ; clearly, at all events. In the sum of his life he finds 
this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him ; — 
this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share 
of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He 

30 would fain set it down forever ; engrave it on a rock, if he 
could ; saying, " This is the best of me ; for the rest, I ate, 
and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; my 
life was as the vapor, and is not ; but this I saw and knew : 
this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory." That is 

35 his " writing " ; it is, in his small human way, and with 



i. OF kings' treasuries. 29 

whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscrip- 
tion, or scripture. That is a " Book." 

10. Perhaps you think no books were ever so written ? 
But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, or 

at all in kindness ? or do you think there is never any hon- 5 
esty or benevolence in wise people ? None of us, I hope, 
are so unhappy as to think that. Well, whatever bit of a 
wise man's work is honestly and benevolently done, that bit 
is his book, or his piece of art.* It is mixed always with 
evil fragments — ill-done, redundant, affected work. But lo 
if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, 
and those are the book. 

11. Now, books of this kind have been written in all ages 
by their greatest men, — by great readers, great statesmen, 
and great thinkers. These are all at your choice ; and Life 15 
is short. You have heard as much before; — yet, have you 
measured and mapped out this short life and its possibili- 
ties ? Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read 
that — that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow? 
Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or your stable- 20 
boy, when you may talk with queens and kings ; or flatter 
yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your 
own claims to respect, that you jostle with the hungry and 
common crowd for entree here, and audience there, when all 
the while this eternal court is open to you, with its society, 25 
wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, 
and the mighty, of every place and time ? Into that you 
may enter always ; in that you may take fellowship and 
rank according to your wish ; from that, once entered into 
it, you can never be an outcast but by your own fault ; by 30 
your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent 
aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with 
which you strive to take high place in the society of the 

* Note this sentence carefully, and compare the "Queen of the Air," 
§ lot). 



^0 SESAME AND LILIES. 

living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are 
in them, by the place you desire to take in this company of 
the Dead. 

12. " The place you desire," and the place you Jit yourself 
5 for, I must also say ; because, observe, this court of the 

past differs from all living aristocracy in this: — it is open 
to labor and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will 
bribe, no name overaAve, no artifice deceive, the guardian of 
those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar 

10 person ever enters there. At the portieres of that silent 
Faubourg St. Germain, there is but brief question : " Do 
you deserve to enter ? Pass. Do you ask to be the com- 
panion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you shall 
be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise ? Learn 

15 to understand it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms ? 
— no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you. 
The living lord may assume courtesy, the living philosopher 
explain his thought to you with considerate pain ; but here 
we neither feign nor interpret ; you must rise to the level 

20 of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, and 
share our feelings if you would recognize our presence." 

13. This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that 
it is much. You must, in a word, love these people, if you 
are to be among them. No ambition is of any use. They 

25 scorn your ambition. You must love them, and show your 

love in these two following ways. 

I. — First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and to 

enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe ; 

not to find your own expressed by them. If the person who 
30 wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not read 

it ; if he be, he will think differently from you in many 

respects. 

Very ready we are to say of a book, " How good this is — 

that's exactly what I think ! " But the right feeling is, 
35 " How strange that is ! I never thought of that before, and 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 31 

yet I see it is true ; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, some 
day." But whether thus submissively or not, at least be 
sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to 
find yours. Judge it afterwards if you think yourself quali- 
fied to do so ; but ascertain it first. And be sure also, if 5 
the author is worth anything, that you will not get at his 
meaning all at once ; — nay, that at his whole meaning you 
will not for a long time arrive in any wise. Not that he 
does not say what he means, and in strong words too ; but 
he cannot say it all ; and what is more strange, will not, but 10 
in a hidden way and in parable, in order that he may be 
sure you want it. I cannot quite see the reason of this, nor 
analyze that cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men which 
makes them always hide their deeper thought. They do not 
give it you by way of help, but of reward ; and will make 15 
themselves sure that you deserve it before they allow you 
to reach it. But it is the same with the physical type of 
wisdom, gold. There seems, to you and me, no reason why 
the electric forces of the earth should not carry whatever 
there is of gold within it at once to the mountain tops, so 20 
that kings and people might know that all the gold they 
could get was there ; and without any trouble of digging, or 
anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, and coin 
as much as they needed. But Nature does not manage it 
so. She puts it in little fissures in the earth, nobody knows 25 
where ; you may dig long and find none ; you must dig pain- 
fully to find any. 

14. And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. 
When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, 
'' Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would ? 30 
Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in 
good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my 
breath good, and my temper ? " And, keeping the figure 
a little longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a 
thoroughly useful one, the metal you are in search of 35 



32 SESAME AND LILIES. 

being the author's mind or meaning, his words are as the 
rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at 
it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learn- 
ing ; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. 

5 Do not hope to get at any good author's meaning without 
those tools and that fire ; often you will need sharpest, fin- 
est chiselling, and patientest fusing, before you can gather 
one grain of the metal. 

15. And, therefore, first of all, I tell you earnestly and 

10 authoritatively (I know I am right in this), you must get 
into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring 
yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable — nay, letter 
by letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposi- 
tion of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in the 

15 function of signs, that the study of books is called "litera- 
ture," and that a man versed in it is called, by the consent 
of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or 
of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomen- 
clature this real fact, — that you might read all the books 

20 in the British Museum (if you could live long enough), and 
remain an utterly " illiterate," uneducated person ; but that 
if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that 
is to say, with real accuracy, — you are f orevermore in some 
measure an educated person. The entire difference between 

25 education and non-education (as regards the merely intel- 
lectual part of it), consists in this accuracy. A well-edu- 
cated gentleman may not know many languages, — may not 
be able to speak any but his own, — may have read very 
few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows 

30 precisely ; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces 
rightly ; above all, he is learned in the peerage of words ; 
knows the words of true descent and ancient blood, at a 
glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all 
their ancestry, their intermarriages, distant relationships, 

35 and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 33 

they held, among the natioual noblesse of words at any- 
time, and in any country. But an uneducated person may 
know, by memory, many languages, and talk them all, and 
yet truly know not a word of any, — not a word even of his 
own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able 5 
to make his way ashore at most ports ; yet he has only to 
speak a sentence of any language to be known for an illit- 
erate person ; so also the accent, or turn of expression of 
a single sentence, will at once mark a scholar. And this 
is so strongly felt, so conclusively admitted, by educated 10 
persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, 
in the paij.iament of any civilized nation, to assign to a man 
a certain degree of inferior standing forever. 

16. And this is right ; but it is a pity that the accuracy 
insisted on is not greater, and required to a serious purpose. 15 
It is right that a false Latin quantity should excite a smile 
in the House of Commons ; but it is wrong that a false 
English meaning should not excite a frown there. Let the 
accent of words be watched ; and closely : let their meaning 
be watched more closely still, and fewer will do the work. 20 
A few words, well chosen and distinguished, will do work 
that a thousand cannot, when every one is acting, equivo- 
cally, in the function of another. Yes ; and words, if they 
are not watched, will do deadly work sometimes. There 
are masked words droning and skulking about us in Europe 25 
just now, — (there never were so many, owing to the spread 
of a shallow, blotching, blundering, infectious " informa- 
tion," or rather deformation, everywhere, and to the teach- 
ing of catechisms and phrases at schools instead of human 
meanings) — there are masked words abroad, I say, which 30 
nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most 
people will also light for, live for, or even die for, fancying 
they mean this or that, or the other, of things dear to them : 
for such words wear chamseleon cloaks — '•' groundlion " 
cloaks, of the color of the ground of any man's fancy : on 35 



34 SESAME AND LILIES. 

that ground they lie in wait, and rend him with a spring 
from it. There never were creatures of prey so mischiev- 
ous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, 
as these masked words ; they are the unjust stewards of all 

5 men's ideas: whatever fancy or favorite instinct a man 
most cherishes, he gives to his favorite masked word to 
take care of for him ; the word at last comes to have an 
infinite power over him, — you cannot get at him but by 
its ministry. 

10 17. And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, 
there is a fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, 
almost whether they will or no, in being able to use Greek 
or Latin words for an idea when they want it to be awful ; 
and Saxon or otherwise common words when they want it 

15 to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary effect, for in- 
stance, would be produced on the minds of people who 
are in the habit of taking the Form of the '""Word" they 
live by, for the Power of which that Word tells them, if 
we always either retained, or refused, the Greek form 

20 '' biblos," or " biblion," as the right expression for " book " 
— instead of employing it only in the one instance in which 
we wish to give dignity to the idea, and translating it into 
English everywhere else. How wholesome it would be for 
many simple persons if, in such places (for instance) as 

25 Acts xix. 19, we retained the Greek expression, instead of 
translating it, and they had to read — " Many of them also 
which used curious arts, brought their Bibles together, and 
burnt them before all men ; and they counted the price of 
them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver " ! Ov if, 

soon the other hand, we translated where we retain it, and 
always spoke of " the Holy Book," instead of " Holy Bible,** 
it might come into more heads than it does at present, that 
the Word of God, by which the heavens were of old, and 
by which they are now kept in store,* cannot be made a 
*2 Peter iii. 5-7 



I, OF kings' treasuries. 35 

present of to anybody in morocco binding ; nor sown on any 
wayside by help either of steam plough or steam press ; 
but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, and by us with 
contumely refused : and sown in us daily, and by us, as in- 
stantly as may be, choked. 5 

18. So, again, consider what effect has been produced on 
the English vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous Latin 
form '' damno," in translating the Greek /caraKptvoj, when 
people charitably wish to make it forcible ; and the substi- 
tution of the temperate " condemn " for it, when they choose 10 
to keep it gentle; and what notable sermons have been 
preached by illiterate clergymen on — " He that believeth 
not shall be damned ; " though they would shrink with 
horror from translating Heb. xi. 7, " The saving of his 
house, by which he damned the world," or John viii. 10- 15 
11, "Woman, hath no man damned thee? She saith, No 
man, Lord. Jesus answered her, Neither do I damn thee : 
go, and sin no more." And divisions in the mind of 
Europe, which have cost seas of blood, and in the defence 
of which the noblest souls of men have been cast away 20 
in frantic desolation, countless as forest-leaves — though, 
in the heart of them, founded on deeper causes — have 
nevertheless been rendered practically possible, mainly, by 
the European adoption of the Greek word for a public 
meeting, "ecclesia," to give peculiar respectability to such 25 
meetings, when held for religious purposes ; and other 
collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar English one of 
using the word " priest " as a contraction for "■ presbyter." 

19. Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the 
habit you must form. Nearly every word in your language 30 
has been first a word of some other language — of Saxon, 
German, French, Latin, or Greek ; (not to speak of eastern 
and primitive dialects). And many words have been all 
these ; — that is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, 
French or German next, and English last : undergoing a 35 



36 SESAME AND LILIES. 

certain change of sense and use on the lips of each nation ; 
but retaining a deep vital meaning, which all good scholars 
feel in employing them, even at this day. If you do not 
know the Greek alphabet, learn it ; young or old — girl or 

5 boy — whoever you may be, if you think of reading seri- 
ously (which, of course, implies that you have some leisure 
at command), learn your Greek alphabet ; then get good 
dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you are 
in doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max 

10 Mliller's lectures thoroughly, to begin with ; and, after that, 
never let a word escape you that looks suspicious. It is 
severe work ; but you will hnd it, even at first, interesting, 
and at last, endlessly amusing. And the general gain to 
your character, in power and precision, will be quite 

15 incalculable. 

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, 
Greek, or Latin, or French. It takes a whole life to learn 
any language perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the 
meanings through which the English word has passed ; 

20 and those which in a good writer's work it must still bear. 

20. And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with 

your permission, read a few lines of a true book with you, 

carefully ; and see what will come out of them. I will take 

a book perfectly known to you all. No English words are 

25 more familiar to us, yet few perhaps have been read with 
less sincerity. I will take these few following lines of 
Lycidas : — 

" Last came, and last did go, 

The pilot of the Galilean lake. 
3Q Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, 

(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,) 

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake. 

' How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, 

Enow of such as for their bellies' sake 
35 Creep, and intrude, and cliuib into the fold ! 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 37 

Of other care they little reckoning make, 

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 

And shove away the worthy bidden guest ; 

Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 

A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else, the least 5 

That to the faithful herdman's art belongs ! 

What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ; 

And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw. 

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 10 

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw. 

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ; 

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 

Daily devours apace, and nothing said.' " 

Let US think over this passage, and examine its 15 
words. 

First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to St. 
Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but the very 
types of it which Protestants usually refuse most passion- 
ately ? His " mitred " locks ! Milton was no Bishop- 20 
lover ; how comes St. Peter to be " mitred " ? " Two 
massy keys he bore." Is this, then, the power of the keys 
claimed by the Bishops of Rome, and is it acknowledged 
here by Milton only in a poetical license, for the sake of its 
picturesqueness, that he may get the gleam of the golden 25 
keys to help his effect ? 

Do not think it. Great men do not play stage tricks with 
the doctrines of life and death: only little men do that. Mil- 
ton means what he says ; and means it with his might too 
— is going to put the whole strength of his spirit presently 30 
into the saying of it. For though not a lover of false bishops, 
he was a lover of true ones ; and the Lake-pilot is here, in 
his thoughts, the type and head of true episcopal power. 
For Milton reads that text, " I will give unto thee the keys 
of the kingdom of Heaven " quite honestly. Puritan though 3.5 
he be, he would not blot it out of the book because there 



38 SESAME AND LILIES. 

have been bad bishops ; nay, in order to understand Mm, 
we must understand that verse first ; it will not do to eye 
it askance, or whisper it under our breath, as if it were a 
weapon of an adverse sect. It is a solemn, universal asser- 

5 tion, deeply to be kept in mind by all sects. But perhaps 
we shall be better able to reason on it if we go on a little 
farther, and come back to it. For clearly this marked in- 
sistence on the power of the true episcopate is to make us 
feel more weightily what is to be charged against the false 

10 claimants of episcopate ; or generally, against false claim- 
ants of power and rank in the body of the clergy : they 
who, *' for their bellies' sake, creep, and intrude, and climb 
into the fold." 

21. Never think Milton uses those three words to fill up 

15 his verse, as a loose writer would. He needs all the three ; 
— specially those three, and no more than those — " creep," 
and " intrude," and " climb " ; no other words would or 
could serve the turn, and no more could be added. For 
they exhaustively comprehend the three classes, correspond- 

20ent to the three characters, of men who dishonestly seek 
ecclesiastical power. First, those who "creep" into the 
fold ; who do not care for office, nor name, but for secret 
influence, and do all things occultly and cunningly, consent- 
ing to any servility of office or conduct, so only that they 

25 may intimately discern, and unawares direct, the minds of 
men. Then those who " intrude " (thrust, that is) them- 
selves into the fold, who by natural insolence of heart, 
and stout eloquence of tongue, and fearlessly perseverant 
self-assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the com- 

30mon crowd. Lastly, those who "climb," who, by labor 
and learning, both stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in 
the cause of their own ambition, gain high dignities and 
authorities, and become " lords over the heritage," though 
not " ensamples to the flock." 

35 22. Now go on : — 



I. OF king's treasuries. 39 

" Of other care they little reckoning make, 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. 
Blind mouths — " 

I pause again, for this is a strange expression : a broken 
metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly. 5 

Not so ; its very audacity and pithiness are intended to 
make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those 
two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries 
of right character, in the two great offices of the Church — 
those of bishop and pastor. 10 

A "Bishop" means "a person who sees." 

A "Pastor" means "a person who feeds." 

The most unbishoply character a man can have is there- 
fore to be Blind. 

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be 15 
fed, — to be a Mouth. 

Take the two reverses together, and you have "blind 
mouths." We may advisably follow out this idea a little. 
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops 
desiring poioer more than liglit They want authority, not 20 
outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule ; though it 
may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke ; it is the king's 
office to rule ; the bishop's office is to oversee the flock ; to 
number it, sheep by sheep ; to be ready always to give full 
account of it. Now, it is clear he cannot give account of 25 
the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies of 
his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has 
to do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at 
any moment, he can obtain the history, from childhood, of 
every living soul in his diocese, and of its present state. 30 
Down in that back street. Bill and Nancy, knocking each 
other's teeth out! — Does the bishop know all about it? 
Has he his eye upon them ? Has he had his eye upon 
them? Can he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got 



40 SESAME AND LILIES. 

into the habit of beating Nancy about the head? If he can- 
not he is no bishop, though he had a mitre as high as Salis- 
bury steeple ; he is no bishop, — he has sought to be at the 
helm instead of the masthead ; he has no sight of things. 

5 " Nay," you say, " it is not his duty to look after Bill in the 
back street." What! the fat sheep that have full fleeces 
— you think it is only those he should look after, while (go 
back to your Milton) " the hungry sheep look up, and are 
not fed, besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw" 

10 (bishops knowing nothing about it) "■ daily devours apace, 
and nothing said " ? 

" But that's not our idea of a bishop." * Perhaps not ; 
but it was St. Paul's ; and it was Milton's. They may be 
right, or we may be ; but we must not think we are reading 

15 either one or the other by putting our meaning into their 
words. 

23. I go on. 

" But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw." 

This is to meet the vulgar answer that " if the poor are 
20 not looked after in their bodies, they are in their souls ; 
they have spiritual food." 

And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual 
food ; they are only swollen with wind." At first you may 
think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, 
25 it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin and 
Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of " Spirit." 
It is only a contraction of the Latin word " breath," and an 
indistinct translation of the Greek word for " wind." The 
same word is used in writing, " The wind bloweth where it 
30 listeth ; " and in writing, " So is every one that is born of 
the Spirit : " born of the hreath, that is ; for it means the 
breath of God, in soul and body. We have the true sense 

* Compare the 13th Letter in " Time and Tide." 



I. OF kings' teeasuries. 41 

of it in our words " inspiration "' and " expire." Now, there 
are two kinds of breath with which the flock may be filled ; 
God's breath and man's. The breath of God is health, and 
life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks 
on the hills ; but man's breath — the word which he calls 5 
spiritual — is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of 
the fen. They rot inwardly with it ; they are puffed up by 
it, as a dead body by the vapors of its own decomposition. 
This is literally true of all false religious teaching; the first, 
and last, and fatalest sign of it is that " puffing up." Your 10 
converted children, who teach their parents ; your converted 
convicts, who teach honest men; your converted dunces, 
who, having lived in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, 
suddenly awaking to the fact of there being a God, fancy 
themselves therefore His peculiar people and messengers; 15 
your sectarians of every species, small and great. Catholic 
or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think 
themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong ; and 
preeminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can 
be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by 20 
work instead of act, and wish instead of work; — these are 
the true fog children — clouds, these, without water ; bodies, 
these, of putrescent vapor and skin, without blood or flesh : 
blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with — corrupt, and 
corrupting, — " Swoln with wind, and the rank mist they 25 
draw." 

24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the 
power of the keys, for now we can understand them. Note 
the difference between Milton and Dante in their interpre- 
tation of this power : for once, the latter is weaker in 30 
thought ; he supposes both the keys to be of the gate of 
heaven ; one is of gold, the other of silver : they are given 
by St. Peter to the sentinel angel ; and it is not easy to 
determine the meaning either of the substances of the 
three steps of the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton 35 



42 SESAME AND LILIES. 

makes one, of gold, the key of heaven ; the other, of iron, 
the key of the prison in which the wicked teachers are to 
be bound who " have taken away the key of knowledge, yet 
entered not in themselves." 

5 We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to 
see, and feed ; and of all who do so it is said, " He that 
watereth, shall be watered also himself." But the reverse 
is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be tvitherecl him- 
self ; and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of 

10 sight — shut into the perpetual prison-house. And that 
prison opens here, as well as hereafter; he who is to be 
bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. That com- 
mand to the strong angels, of which the rock-apostle is the 
image, " Take him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast 

15 him out," issues, in its measure, against the teacher, for 
every help withheld, and for every truth refused, and for 
every falsehood enforced ; so that he is more strictly fet- 
tered the more he fetters, and farther outcast, as he more 
and more misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage close 

20 upon him, and as "the golden opes, the iron shuts amain." 

25. We have got something out of the lines, I think, and 

much more is yet to be found in them ; but we have done 

enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word 

examination of your author which is rightly called "read- 

25 ing " ; watching every accent and expression, and putting 
ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our own 
personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able 
assuredly to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus / 
thought, in mis-reading Milton." And by this process you 

30 will gradually come to attach less weight to your own 
" Thus I thought " at other times. You will begin to per- 
ceive that what you thought was a matter of no serious 
importance; — that your thoughts on any subject are not 
perhaps the clearest and wisest that could be arrived at 

35 thereupon : — in fact, that unless you are a very singular 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 43 

person, you cannot be said to have any '' thoughts " at all ; 
that you have no materials for them, in any serious mat- 
ters * ; — no right to " think," but only to try to learn more 
of the facts. Nay, most probably all your life (unless, as I 
said, you are a singular persoia) you will have no legitimate 5 
right to an " opinion " on any business, except that instantly 
under your hand. What must of necessity be done, you 
can always find out, beyond question, how to do. Have 
you a house to keep in order, a commodity to sell, a field 
to plough, a ditch to cleanse ? There need be no two 10 
opinions about the proceedings ; it is at your peril if you 
have not much more than an "opinion" on the way to 
manage such matters. And also, outside of your own busi- 
ness, there are one or two subjects on which you are bound 
to have but one opinion. That roguery and lying are 15 
objectionable, and are instantly to be flogged out of the way 
whenever discovered ; — that covetousness and love of quar- 
relling are dangerous dispositions even in children, and 
deadly dispositions in men and nations ; — that in the end, 
the God of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind 20 
people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones ; — on 
these general facts you are bound to have but one, and that 
a very strong, opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, 
governments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the 
whole, you can know nothing, — judge nothing; that the 25 
best you can do, even though you may be a well-educated 
person, is to be silent, and strive to be wiser every day, and 
to understand a little more of the thoughts of others, which 
so soon as you try to do honestly, you will discover that the 
thoughts even of the wisest are very little more than perti-30 
nent questions. To put the difficulty into a clear shape, 
and exhibit to you the grounds for indecision, that is all 

* Modern " education " for the most part signifies giving people the 
faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to 
them. 



44 SESAME AND LILIES. 

they can generally do for you ! — and well for them and for 
us, if indeed they are able " to mix the music with our 
thoughts, and sadden us with heavenly doubts." This 
writer, from whom I have been reading to you, is not 

5 among the first or wisest: he sees shrewdly as far as he 
sees, and therefore it is easy to find out his full meaning ; 
but with the greater men, you cannot fathom their mean- 
ing ; they do not even wholly measure it themselves, — 
it is so wide. Suppose I had asked you, for instance, to 

10 seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead of Milton's, on this 
matter of Church authority ? — or of Dante's ? Have any 
of you, at this instant, the least idea what either thought 
about it ? Have you ever balanced the scene with the 
bishops in Richard III. against the character of Cranmer ? 

15 the description of St. Francis and St. Dominic against that 
of him who made Virgil wonder to gaze upon him, — '*dis- 
teso, tanto vilmente, nell' eterno esilio " ; or of him whom 
Dante stood beside, " come '1 frate die confessa lo perfido 
assassin " ? * Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men better 

20 than most of us, I x^resume ! They were both in the midst 
of the main struggle between the temporal and spiritual 
powers. They had an opinion, we may guess. But where 
is it ? Bring it into court ! Put Shakespeare's or Dante's 
creed into articles, and send it up for trial by the Ecclesi- 

25 astical Courts ! 

26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and 
many a day, to come at the real purposes and teaching of 
these great men ; but a very little honest study of them 
will enable you to perceive that what you took for your 

30 own "judgment " was mere chance prejudice, and drifted, 
helpless, entangled weed of castaway thought; nay, you 
will see that most men's minds are indeed little better than 
rough heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly bar- 
ren, partly overgrown with pestilent brakes, and venomous, 

* Inf. xxiii. 125, 126 ; xix. 49, 50. 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 45 

wind-sown herbage of evil surmise ; that the first thing you 
have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scornfully 
to set fire to this ; burn all the jungle into wholesome ash- 
heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true literary 
work before you, for life, must begin with obedience to that 5 
order, " Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among 
thorns.'^ 

27. II.* Having then faithfully listened to the great 
teachers, that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have 
yet this higher advance to make ; — you have to enter into 10 
their Hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight, so 
you must stay with them, that you may share at last their 
just and mighty Passion. Passion, or "sensation." I am 
not afraid of the word ; still less of the thing. You have 
heard many outcries against sensation lately ; but, I can tell 15 
you, it is not less sensation we want, but more. The en- 
nobling difference between one man and another, — between 
one animal and another, — is precisely in this, that one feels 
more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation 
might not be easily got for us ; if we were earth-worms, 20 
liable at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, per- 
haps too much sensation might not be good for us. But 
being human creatures, it is good for us ; nay, we are only 
human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honor is pre- 
cisely in proportion to our passion. 25 

28. You know I said of that great and pure society of 
the Dead, that it would allow " no vain or vulgar person to 
enter there." What do you think I meant by a " vulgar " 
person ? What do you yourselves mean by " vulgarity " ? 
You will find it a fruitful subject of thought ; but, briefly, 30 
the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. - 
Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and 
undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true 
inbred vulgarity, there is a dreadful callousness, which, in 

* Compare § 13 pp. 30 and 31. 



46 SESAME AND LILIES. 

extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit 
and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, 
and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead 
heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, 

5 that men become vulgar ; they are forever vulgar, precisely 
in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy — of quick 
understanding, — of all that, in deep insistence on the com- 
mon, but most accurate term, may be called the " tact " or 
" touch-faculty," of body and soul : that tact which the 

10 Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all 
creatures ; — fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond 
reason ; — the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason 
can but determine what is true : — it is the God-given 
passion of humanity which alone can recognize what God 

15 has made good. 

29. We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, 
not merely to know from them what is true, but chiefly 
to feel with them what is just. Now, to feel with them, 
we must be like them ; and none of us can become that 

20 without pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and 
tested knowledge, — not the first thought that comes, — 
so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion, — 
not the first passion that comes. The first that come are 
the vain, the false, the treacherous ; if you yield to them, 

25 they will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hol- 
low enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true 
passion left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity 
is in itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined. 
Its nobility is in its force and justice ; it is wrong when 

30 it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. There is a mean 
wonder, as of a child who sees a juggler tossing golden 
balls, and this is base, if you will. But do you think that 
the wonder is ignoble, or the sensation less, with which 
every human soul is called to watch the golden balls of 

35 heaven tossed through the night by the Hand that made 



1. OF kings' treasuries. 47 

them ? There is a mean curiosity, as of a child opening 
a forbidden door, or a servant prying into her master's 
business ; — and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the front 
of danger, the source of the great river beyond the sand, 

— the place of the great continent beyond the sea ; — as 
nobler curiosity still, which questions of the source of the 
Eiver of Life, and of the space of the Continent of Heaven 

— things which *'the angels desiire to look into." So the 
anxiety is ignoble, with which you linger over the course 
and catastrophe of an idle tale ; but do you think the anx- lo 
iety is less, or greater, with which you watch, or ought to 
watch, the dealings of fate and destiny with the life of an 
agonized nation ? Alas ! it is the narrowness, selfishness, 
minuteness, of your sensation that you have to deplore in 
England at this day ; — sensation which spends itself in bou- 15 
quets and speeches ; in revellings and junketings ; in sham 
fights and gay puppet shows, while you can look on and 
see noble nations murdered, man by man, without an effort 
or a tear. 

30. I said " minuteness " and " selfishness " of sensation, 20 
but it would have been enough to have said "injustice" 
or " unrighteousness " of sensation. For as in nothing is 
a gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar person, 
so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have been) 
better to be discerned from a mob, than in this, — that 25 
their feelings are constant and just, results of due con- 
templation, and of equal thought. You can talk a mob 
into anything ; its feelings may be — usually are — on the 
whole, generous and right; but it has no foundation for 
them, no hold of them ; you may tease or tickle it into 30 
any, at your pleasure ; it thinks by infection, for the most 
part, catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing 
so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when the 
fit is on ; — nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, 
when the fit is past. But a gentleman's, or a gentle nation's, 35 



48 SESAME AND LILIES. 

passions are just, measured, and continuous. A great nation, 
for instance, does not spend its entire national wits for a 
couple of months in weighing evidence of a single ruffian's 
having done a single murder; and for a couple of years 

5 see its own children murder each other by their thousands 
or tens of thousands a day, considering only what the effect 
is likely to be on the price of cotton, and caring nowise to 
determine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither 
does a great nation send its poor little boys to jail for steal- 

10 ing six walnuts ; and allow its bankrupts to steal their hun- 
dreds of thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with 
poor men's savings, to close their doors ''under circum- 
stances over which they have no control," with a "by 
your leave " ; and large landed estates to be bought by 

15 men who have made their money by going with armed 
steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at 
the cannon's mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the 
foreign nation, the common highwayman's demand of "your 
money or your life," into that of "your money cuid your 

20 life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its 
innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, 
and rotted out of them by dung-hill plague, for the sake 
of sixpence a life extra per week to its landlords * ; and 
then debate, with drivelling tears, and diabolical sympa- 

25thies, whether it ought not piously to save, and nursingly 
cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great nation 
having made up its mind that hanging is quite the whole- 
somest process for its homicides in general, can yet with 
mercy distinguish between the degrees of guilt in homi- 

30 cides ; and does not yelp like a pack of frost-pinched 
wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, 
or gray-haired clodpate Othello, " perplexed i' the ex- 

* See note at end of lecture. I have put it in largfe type, because the 
course of matters since it was written has made it perhaps better worth 
attention. 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 49 

treme," at the very moment that it is sending a Minister 
of the Crown to make polite speeches to a man who is 
bayoneting young girls in their fathers' sight, and killing 
noble youths in cool blood, faster than a country butcher 
kills lambs in spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not 5 
mock Heaven and its Powers, by pretending belief in a 
revelation which asserts the love of money to be the root 
of all evil, and declaring, at the same time, that it is actu- 
ated, and intends to be actuated, in all chief national deeds 
and measures, by no other love. 10 

31. My friends, I do not know why any of us should 
talk about reading. We want some sharper discipline than 
that of reading ; but, at all events, be assured, we cannot 
read. No reading is possible for a people with its mind in 
this state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible 15 
to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the Eng- 
lish public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful 
writing, — so incapable of thought has it become in its in- 
sanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little 
worse than this incapacity of thought ; it is not corruption 20 
of the inner nature ; we ring true still, when anything 
strikes home to us ; and though the idea that everything 
should '•' pay " has infected our every purpose so deeply, 
that even when we would play the good Samaritan, we 
never take out our twopence and give them to the host, 25 
without saying, " When I come again, thou shalt give me 
fourpence," there is a capacity of noble passion left in our 
hearts' core. We show it in our work — in our war, — 
even in those unjust domestic affections which make us 
furious at a small private wrong, while we are polite to a 30 
boundless public one : we are still industrious to the last 
hour of the day, though we add the gambler's fury to the 
laborer's patience ; we are still brave to the death, though 
incapable of discerning true cause for battle ; and are still 
true in affection to our own flesh, to the death, as the sea- 35 



50 SESAME AND LILIES. 

monsters are, and the rock-eagles. And there is hope for 
a nation while this can be still said of it. As long as it 
holds its life in its hand, ready to give it for its honor 
(though a foolish honor), for its love (though a selfish love), 

5 and for its business (though a base business), there is hope 
for it. But hope only; for this instinctive, reckless virtue 
cannot last. No nation can last, which has made a mob of 
itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline its 
passions, and direct them, or they will discipline it, one 

10 day, with scorpion-whips. Above all, a nation cannot last 
as a money-making mob: it cannot with impunity, — it can- 
not with existence, — go on despising literature, despising 
science, despising art, despising nature, despising compas- 
sion, and concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you think 

15 these are harsh or wild words? Have patience with me 
but a little longer. I will prove their truth to you, clause 
by clause. 

32. I. I say first we have despised literature. What do 
we, as a nation, care about books ? How much do you 

20 think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or pri- 
vate, as compared Avith what we spend on our horses ? If 
a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad — 
a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, 
though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and 

25 you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their 
books. Or, to go lower still, how much do you think the 
contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public 
and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of 
its wine-cellars ? What position would its expenditure on 

30 literature take, as compared with its expenditure on luxuri- 
ous eating? We talk of food for the mind, as of food for 
the body : now a good book contains such food inexhausti- 
bl}' ; it is a provision for life, and for the best part of us ; 
yet how long most people would look at the best book be- 

oo fore they would give the price of a large turbot for it ! 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 51 

Though there have been men who have pinched their stom- 
achs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries 
were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men's 
dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more 
the pity ; for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more 5 
precious to us if it has been won by work or economy ; and 
if public libraries were half as costly as public dinners, or 
books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish 
men and women might sometimes suspect there was good 
in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling ; whereas 10 
the very cheapness of literature is making even wise people 
forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. 
No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor 
is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and 
loved, and loved again ; and marked, so that you can refer 15 
to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the 
weapon he needs in an armory, or a house-wife bring the 
spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is good; but 
there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good 
book ; and the family must be poor indeed which, once in 20 
their lives, cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay 
their baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and we 
are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other's books 
out of circulating libraries ! 

33. II. I say we have despised science. " What ! " you 25 
exclaim, "are we not foremost in all discovery,* and is not 
the whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of our inven- 
tions ? " Yes, but do you suppose that is national work ? 
That work is all done in spite of the nation ; by private 
people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, indeed, to 30 
make our profit of science ; we snap up anything in the way 



* Since this was written , the answer has become definitely — No ; we hav- 
ing surrendered the field of Arctic discovery to the Continental nations, as 
being ourselves too poor to pay for ships. 



52 SESAME AND LILIES. 

of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly enougli; but 
if the scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to us, that 
is another story. Wliat have we publicly done for science ? 
We are obliged to know what o'clock it is, for the safety of 

5 our ships, and therefore we pay for an Observatory ; and 
we allow ourselves, in the person or our Parliament, to be 
annually tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, 
for the British Museum ; sullenly apprehending that to be 
a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. 

10 If anybody will pay for their own telescope, and resolve 
another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it 
were our own ; if one in ten thousand of onr hunting squires 
suddenly perceives that the earth was indeed made to be 
something else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it 

15 himself, and tells us where the gold is, and where the coals, 
w^e understand that there is some use in that ; and very 
properly knight him : but is the accident of his having 
found out how to employ himself usefully any credit to 
us ? (The negation of such discovery among his brother 

20 squires may perhaps be some discredit to us, if we would 
consider of it.) But if you doubt these generalities, here is 
one fact for us all to meditate upon, illustrative of our love 
of science. Two years ago there was a collection of the 
fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria : the best in 

25 existence, containing many specimens unique for perfect- 
ness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a whole 
kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by 
that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market 
worth, among private buyers, w^ould probably have been 

30 some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to 
the English nation for seven hundred : but we would not 
give seven hundred, and the whole series would have been 
in the Munich museum at this moment, if Professor Owen* 

*I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission, which of course 
he could not with propriety have granted, had I asked it ; but I consider 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 53 

had not, with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting 
of the British public in person of its representatives, got 
leave to give four hundred pounds at once, and himself 
become answerable for the other three ! which the said jmb- 
lic will doubtless pay him eventually, but sulkily, and caring 5 
nothing about the matter all the while ; only always ready 
to cackle if any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg of you, 
arithmetically, what this fact means. Your annual expen-. 
diture for public purposes (a third of it for military appara- 
tus) is at least hfty millions. Now .iTOO is to ,£'50,000,000, lo 
roughly, as seven-pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose, 
then, a gentleman of unknown income, but whose wealth 
was to be conjectured from the fact that he spent two thou- 
sand a year on his park walls and footmen only, professes 
himself fond of science ; and that one of his servants comes 15 
eagerly to tell him that an unique collection of fossils, giv- 
ing clue to a new era of creation, is to be had for the sum of 
seven-pence sterling ; and that the gentleman, who is fond 
of science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, 
answers, after keeping his servant waiting several months, 20 
"Well! I'll give you four-pence for them, if you will be 
answerable for the extra three-pence yourself, till next 
year ! " 

34. III. I say you have despised Art ! " What ! " you 
answer, "have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do 25 
not we pay thousands of pounds for single pictures ? and 
have we not Art schools and institutions, more than ever 
nation had before ? " Yes, truly, but all that is for the sake 
of the shop. You would fain sell canvas as well as coals, 
and crockery as w^ell as iron ; you would take every other 30 
nation's bread out of its mouth if you could * ; not being 

it so important tliat the public sliould be aware of the fact, that I do what 
seems to me riglit, though rude. 

* That was our real idea of " Free Trade " — " All the trade to myself." 
You tiud now that by "competition" other people can manage to sell 



54 SESAME AND LILIES. 

able to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in the 
thoroughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, 
screaming to every passer-by, " What d'ye lack ? " You 
know nothing of your own faculties or circumstances ; you 

5 fancy that, among your damp, flat, fat fields of clay, you 
can have as quick art-fancy as the Frenchman among his 
bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic cliffs ; — • 
that Art may be learned as book-keeping is, and when 
learned, will give you more books to keep. You care for 

10 pictures, absolutely, no more than you do for the bills pasted 
on your dead walls. There is always room on the wall for 
the bills to be read, — never for the pictures to be seen. 
You do not know what pictures you have (by repute) in the 
country, nor whether they are false or true, nor whether 

15 they are taken care of or not ; in foreign countries, you 
calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world rotting 
in abandoned wreck — (in Venice you saw the Austrian 
guns deliberately pointed at the palaces containing them), 
and if you heard that all the fine pictures in Europe were 

20 made into sandbags to-morrow on the Austrian forts, it 
would not trouble you so much as the chance of a brace or 
two of game less in your own bags, in a day's shooting. 
That is your national love of Art. 

35. IV. You have despised nature ; that is to say, all the 

25 deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French 
revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France ; you 
have made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your 
one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages 
round their aisles, and eat off their altars.* You have put 



something as well as you — and now we call for Protection again. 
Wretches ! 

* I meant that the beautiful places of the world — Switzerland, Italy, 
South Germany, and so on — are, indeed, the truest cathedrals — places to 
be reverent in, and to worship in ; and that we only care to drive through 
them ; and to eat aud drink at their most sacred places. 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 55 

a railroad-bridge over the falls of Schaffhausen. You have 
tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel ; you have 
destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva ; there 
is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled 
with bellowing fire ; there is no particle left of English land 5 
which you have not trampled coal ashes into* — nor any 
foreign city in which the spread of your presence is not 
marked among its fair old streets and happy gardens by a 
consuming white leprosy of new hotels and perfumers' 
shops: the Alps themselves, which your own poets used to 10 
love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear- 
garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down 
again, with " shrieks of delight." When you are past 
shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are 
glad with, you fill the quietude of their valleys with gun-i5 
powder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption 
of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self- 
satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrowfullest specta- 
cles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the deep inner 
significance of them, are the English mobs in the valley of 20 
Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers ; 
and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich expressing their Christian 
thanks for the gift of the vine, by assembling in knots in 
the " towers of the vineyards," and slowly loading and firing 
horse-pistols from morning till evening. It is pitiful, to have 25 
dim conceptions of duty ; more pitiful, it seems to me, to 
have conceptions like these, of mirth. 

36. Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need 
of words of mine for proof of this. I will merely print one 
of the newspaper paragraphs which I am in the habit of 30 
cutting out and throwing into my store-drawer; here is one 
from a " Daily Telegraph " of an early date this year (1865) 

* I was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding all the river shore 
at Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth, from the mere drift of 
soot-laden air from places many miles away. 



56 SESAME AND LILIES. 

(date which, though by me carelessly left unmarked, is 
easily discoverable ; for on the back of the slip, there is the 
announcement that "yesterday the seventh of the special 
services of this year was performed by the Bishop of Ripon 

5 in St. Paul's ") ; it relates only one of such facts as happen 
now daily ; this by chance having taken a form in which it 
came before the coroner. I will print the paragraph in red. 
[Set in italic type here. Ed.] Be sure, the facts themselves 
are written in that colour, in a book which we shall all of us, 

10 literate or illiterate, have to read our page of, some day. 

An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy 
coroner, at the White Horse tavern, Christ Church, Spital- 
Jields, respecting the death of Michael Collins, aged 58 
years. 3Iary Collins, a miserable-lookiyig woman, said that 

15 she lived tvith the deceased and his son in a room at 
2, CohVs Court, Christ Church. Deceased teas a " tj-ans- 
lator" of boots. Witness ivent out and bought old boots; 
deceased and. his son made them into good ones, and then 
ivitness sold them for ivhat she could get at the shops, which 

20 was very little indeed. Deceased and his son tised to ivork 
night and day to try and get a little bread and tea, and pay 
for the room (2s. a, week), so as to keep the home together. 
On Friday-night week deceased got \ip from his bench and 
began to shiver. He threw down the boots, saying, '' Some- 

25 body else must finish them when I am gone, for I can do 
no more.'" There ivas no fire, and he said, '' / woidd be 
better if I was icarm.'" Witness therefore took two pairs 
of translated boots* to sell at the shop, but she could only 
get 14d. for the two pjairs, for the people at the shop said, 

30 " We must have our profit.''' Witness got l^lb- of coal, and 
a little tea and bread. Her son sat up the whole night to 
make the " translations,'^ to get money, but deceased died 

* One of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, for the good 
of all classes, in our future arrangements, must be that they wear no 
" translated " article of dress. See the preface. 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 67 

on Saturday morning. The family never had enough to 
eat. — Coroner : " It seems to me deplorable that you did 
not go into the ivorkhouse." Witness: "We wanted the com- 
forts of our little home.^' A juror asked tvhat the comforts 
toere, for he ojily saiv a little straw in the corner of the 5 
room, the ivindoivs of which ivere broken. The ivitness began 
to cry, and said that they had a quilt and other little 
things. The deceased said he never ivould go into the ivork- 
house. In summer, ichen the season ivas good, they some- 
times made as much as 10s. profit in the tveek. They then lo 
always saved towards the next iveek, tvhich was generally a 
bad one. In ivinter they made not half so much. For 
three years they had been getting from bad to worse. — 
Cornelius Collins said that he had assisted his father since 
1847. They used to tvork so far into the night that bothi^ 
nearly lost their eyesight. Witness now had a Jilm over 
his eyes. Five years ago deceased applied to the parish for 
aid. The relieving officer gave him a Jflb. loaf and told 
him if he came again he should get the " stones." * That 

* This abbreviation of the penalty of useless laboi- is curiously coinci- 
dent in verbal form with a certain passage which some of us may remem- 
ber. It may perhaps be well to preserve beside this paragraph another 
cutting out of my store-drawer, fn>m the " Morning Post," of about a jiar- 

allel date, Friday, March 10th, 18G5: — "The salons of Mme. C , who 

did the honors with clever imitative grace and elegance, were crowded 
with princes, dukes, marquises, and counts — in fact, with the same male 
company as one meets at the parties of the Pi-incess Metternich and 
Madame Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and members of Parlia- 
ment were present, and appeared to enjoy the animated and dazzling im- 
proper scene. On the second floor the supper tables were loaded with 
every delicacy of the season. That your readers may form some idea of 
the dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I copy the menu of the supper, 
which was served to all the guests (about 200) seated at four o'clock. 
Choice Yquem, Johannisberg, Lafifitte, Tokay, and champagne of the finest 
vintages were served most lavishly throughout the morning. After supper 
dancing was resumed with increased animation, and the ball terminated 
with a chaine dlaholique and a cancan. (Venfer at seven in the morning. 
(Morning service — ' Ere the fresh lawns appeared, under the opening eye- 
lids of the Morn.') Here is the menu: — 'Consomme de volaille a la 



58 SESAME A^^D LILIES. 

disgusted deceased, and he ivouhl have nothing to do with 
them since. They got worse and worse until last Friday 
week, ivhen they had not even a halfpenny to buy a candle. 
Deceased then lay doivn on the straw, dnd said he could not 

5 live till morning. — A juror: ^' You are dying of starvation 
yourself and, you ought to go into the house until the sum- 
mer.^^ — Witness: ^^ If ive ivent in, we should die. When 
we come out in the summer, we should he like people 
dropped from the sky. No one woidd know us, and ive 

10 would not have even a room. I could work now if I had 
food, for my sight would get better." Dr. G. P. Walker said 
deceased died from syncope, from exhaustion from want of 
food. The deceased had had no bedclothes. For four months 
he had had nothing but bread to eat. There was not a particle 

15 of fat in the body. There was no disease, but if there had 
been medical attendance, he might have survived the syncope 
or fainting. The coroner having remarked upon the painful 
nature of the case, the jury returned the following verdict, 
" That deceased died from exhaustion from want of food 

20 and the common necessaries of life; also through want of 
medical aid." 

37. " Why would witness not go into the workhouse ? " 
you ask. Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice against 
the workhouse which the rich have not ; for of course every 

25 one who takes a pension from Government goes into the 
workhouse on a grand scale * : only the workhouses for the 
rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be called 

Bagration : 1(5 hors-d'oeuvres varies. Bouchees a la Talleyrand. Saumons 
froids, sauce Ravigote. Filets de ba?uf en Bellevue, timbales milanaises, 
chaudfroid de gibier. Dindes truffees. Pates de foies gras, buissons 
d'ecrevisses. salades venetiennes, gelees blanches aux fruits, gateaux man- 
ciui, parisiens et parisiennes. Fromages glaces. Ananas. Dessert.' " 

* Please observe this statement, and think of it, and consider how it 
happens that a poor old woman will be ashamed to take a shilling a week 
from the country — but no one is ashamed to take a pension of a thousand 
a year. 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 59 

play-houses. But the poor like to die independently, it 
appears; perhaps if we made the play-houses for them 
pretty and pleasant enough, or gave them their pensions at 
home, and allowed them a little introductory peculation 
with the public money, their minds might be reconciled to 5 
the conditions. Meantime, here are the facts : we make 
our relief either so insulting to them, or so painful, that 
they rather die than take it at 6ur hands ; or, for third 
alternative, we leave them so untaught and foolish that 
they starve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not know- 10 
ing what to do, or what to ask. I say, you despise com- 
passion ; if you did not, such a newspaper paragraph would 
be as impossible in a Christian country as a deliberate 
assassination permitted in its public streets.* " Christian " 

* I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the "Pall Mall Gazette" 
estahlished ; for the power of the press in the hands of highly-educated 
men, in independent position, and of honest purpose, may indeed hecome 
all that it has heen hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editors will therefore, 
I doubt not, pardon me, in that, by very reason of my respect for the jour- 
nal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its third number, page 5, which 
was wrong in every word of it, with the intense wrongness which only an 
honest man can achieve who has taken a false turn of thought in the out- 
set, and is following it, regardless of consequences. It contained at the 
end this notable passage : — 

" The bread of aflfliction, and the water of affliction — aye, and the bed- 
stead and blankets of affliction, afp the very utmost that the law ought to 
give to outcasts merelii as outcasts." I merely put beside this expression of 
the gentlemanly mind of England in 18(55, a part of the message which 
Isaiah was ordered to " lift up his voice like a trumpet " in declaring to the 
gentlemen of his day: "Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist of 
wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal thy bread to 
the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out (margin, 
' afflicted ') to thy house? " The falsehood on which the writer had men- 
tally founded himself, as previously stated by him, was this ; " To confound 
the functions of the dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers 
of a charitable institution is a great and pernicious error." This sentence 
is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus re- 
versed in our minds before we can deal with any existing problem of 
national distress. " To understand that the dispensers of the poor-rates 
are the almoners of the nation, and should distribute its alms with a gentle- 



60 SESAME AND LILIES. 

did I say ? Alas, if we were but wholesomely ?m-Christian, 
it would be impossible : it is our imaginary Christianity 
that helps us to commit these crimes, for we revel and lux- 
uriate in our faith, for the lewd sensation of it ; dressing it 

5 up, like everything else, in fiction. The dramatic Chris- 
tianity of the organ and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight- 
revival — the Christianity which we do not fear to mix 
the mockery of, pictorially, with our play about the devil, 
in our Satanellas, — Roberts, — Fausts ; chanting hymns 

10 through traceried windows for background effect, and artis- 
tically modulating the "Dio" through variation on varia- 
tion of mimicked prayer : (while we distribute tracts, next 
day, for the benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what 
we suppose to be the signification of the Third Command- 

isment; — ) this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired, Christianity, 
we are triumphant in, and draw back the hem of our robes 
from the touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to do a 
piece of common Christian righteousness in a plain English 
word or deed ; to make Christian law any rule of life, and 

20 found one National act or hope thereon, — we know too well 
what our faith comes to for that ! You might sooner get 
lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion 
out of your modern English religion. You had better get^j 
rid of the smoke, and the organ pipes, both : leave them. 

25 and the Gothic windows, and the painted glass, to the prop- 
erty man; give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in onQ^ 
healthy expiration, and look after Lazarus at the doorstep. 
For there is a true Church wherever one hand meets another 
helpfully, and that is the only holy or Mother Church 

30 which ever was, or ever shall be. 

ness and freedom of hand as much greater and franker than that possible I 
to individual charity, as the collective national wisdom and power may be 
supposed greater than those of any single person, is the foundation of all 
law respecting pauperism." (Since this was written the " Pall Mall Ga- 
zette " has become a mere party paper — like the rest; but it writes well 
and does more good than mischief on the whole.) 



;i 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 61 

38. All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, I 
repeat, you nationally despise. You have, indeed, men 
among you who do not ; by whose work, by whose strength, 
by whose life, by whose death, you live, and never thank 
them. Your wealth, your amusement, your pride, would all 5 
be alike impossible, but for those whom you scorn or forget. 
The policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane 
all night to watch the guilt you have created there ; and 
may have his brains beaten out, and be maimed for life, at 
any moment, and never be thanked; the sailor wrestling 10 
with the sea's rage ; the quiet student poring over his book 
or his vial ; the common worker, without praise, and nearly 
without bread, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your 
carts, hopeless, and spurned of all : these are the men by 
whom England lives ; but they are not the nation ; they are 15 
only the body and nervous force of it, acting still from 
old habit in a convulsive perseverance, while the mind is 
gone. Our National wish and purpose are only to be 
amused ; our National religion is the performance of church 
ceremonies, and preaching of soporific truths (or untruths) 20 
to keep the mob quietly at work, while we amuse ourselves ; 
and the necessity for this amusement is fastening on us, as 

a feverish disease of parched throat and wandering eyes — 
senseless, dissolute, merciless. How literally that word Dis- 
Ease, the Negation and possibility Ease, expresses the entire 25 
moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements ! 

39. When men are rightly occupied, their amusement 
grows out of their work, as the color-petals out of a fruitful 
flower ; — when they are faithfully helpful and compassion- 
ate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and 30 
vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But 
now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine 
energy into the false business of money-making ; and hav- 
ing no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed 
up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with 35 



6^ SESAME AND LILIES. 

dolls, but guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with 
their pictures on cavern walls, which men had to dig to 
detect. The justice we do not execute, we mimic in the 
novel and on the stage ; for the beauty we destroy in nature, 

5 we substitute the metamorphosis of the pantomime, and 
(the human nature of us imperatively requiring awe and 
sorrow of so7ne kind) for the noble grief we should have 
borne with our fellows, and the pure tears we should have 
wept with them, we gloat over the pathos of the police 

10 court, and gather the night-dew of the grave. 

40. It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these 
things ; the facts are frightful enough ; — the measure of 
national fault involved in them is perhaps not as great as 
it would at first seem. We permit, or cause, thousands of 

15 deaths daily, but we mean no harm ; we set fire to houses, 
and ravage peasants' fields, yet we should be sorry to find 
we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart ; still 
capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at 
the end of his long life, having had much power with the 

20 public, being plagued in some serious matter by a reference 
to " public opinion," uttered the impatient exclamation, "The 
public is just a great baby ! " And the reason that I have 
allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix them- 
selves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, is that, 

25 the more I see of our national faults or miseries, the more 
they resolve themselves into conditions of childish illiterate- 
ness and want of education in the most ordinary habits of 
thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not 
dulness of brain, which we have to lament ; but an unreach- 

30 able schoolboy's recklessness, only differing from the true 
schoolboy's in its incapacity of being helped, because it 
acknowledges no master. 

^ir^'here is a curious type of us given in one of the 
lovely, neglected works of the last of our great painters. 

35 It is a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its 



i. OF kings' treasuries, 63 

brook, and valley, and hills, and folded morning sky beyond. 
And unmindful alike of these, and of the dead who have 
left these for other valleys and for other skies, a group of 
schoolboys have piled their little books upon a grave, to 
strike them off with stones. So, also, we play with the 5 
words of the dead that would teach us, and strike them far 
from us with our bitter, reckless will ; little thinking that 
those leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not 
only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted 
vault — nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who lo 
would awake for us, and walk with us, if we knew but how 
to call them by their names. How often, even if we lift 
the marble entrance gate, do we but wander among those 
old kings in their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, 
and stir the crowns on their foreheads, and still they are 15 
silent to us, and seem but a dusty imagery ; because we 
know not the incantation of the heart that would wake 
them; — which, if they once heard, they would start up to 
meet us in their power of long ago, narrowly to look upon 
us, and consider us ; and, as the fallen kings of Hades 20 
meet the newly fallen, saying, " Art thou also become weak 
as we — art thou also become one of us ? " so would these 
kings, with their undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, 
saying, " Art thou also become pure and mighty of heart 
as we ? art thou also become one of us ? " 25 

42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — " magnanimous " 

— to be this, is indeed to be great in life ; to become this 
increasingly, is, indeed, to " advance in life," — in life itself 

— not in the trappings of it. My friends, do you remember 
that old Scythian custom, when the head of a house died ? 30 
How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, 
and carried about to his friends' houses ; and each of them 
placed him at his table's head, and all feasted in his pres- 
ence ? Suppose it were offered to you in plain words, as it 
is offered to you in dire facts, that you should gain this 35 



64 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Scythian honor, gradually, while you yet thought yourself 
alive. Suppose the offer were this : You shall die slowly ; 
your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify, your 
heart beat at last only as a rusted group of iron valves, 

5 You^r life shall fade from you, and sink through the earth 
into the ice of Caina ; but, day by day, your body shall be 
dressed more gayly, and set in higher chariots, and have 
more orders on its breast — crowns on its head, if you will. 
Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it, crowd 

10 after it up and down the streets ; build palaces for it, feast 
with it at their tables' heads all the night long ; your soul 
shall stay enough within it to know what they do, and feel 
the weight of the golden dress on its shoulders, and the 
furrow of the crown-edge on the skull ; — no more. Would 

15 you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel? 
Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet 
practically and verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a 
measure; many of us grasp at it in its fulness of horror. 
Every man accepts it, who desires to advance in life without 

20 knowing what life is ; who means only that he is to get 
more horses, and more footmen, and more fortune, and more 
public honor, and — not more personal soul. He only is 
advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood 
warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into 

25 Living* peace. And the men who have this life in them 
are the true lords or kings of the earth — they, and they 
only. All other kingships, so far as they are true, are only 
the practical issue and expression of theirs; if less than 
this, they are either dramatic royalties, — costly shows, 

30 set off, indeed, with real jewels instead of tinsel — but still 
only the toys of nations ; or else, they are no royalties at 
all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and practical issue of 
national folly , for which reason I have said of them else- 
where, "Visible governments are the toys of some nations, 

* " t6 5^ <f>p6vrifjLa tov Trveij/xaros fw^ /cat dp'fjvrj.'''' 



I. OF kings' treasueies. 65 

the diseases of others, the harness of some, the burdens of 
more." 

43. But I have no words for the wonder with wliich I 
hear Kingliood still spoken of, even among thoughtful men, 
as if governed nations were a personal property, and might 5 
be bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, as sheep, of whose 
flesh their king was to feed, and whose fleece he was to 
gather ; as if Achilles's indignant epithet of base kings, 
'•people-eating," were the constant and proper title of all 
monarchs ; and enlargement of a king's dominion meant lO 
the same thing as the increase of a private man's estate ! 
Kings who think so, however powerful, can no more be the 
true kings of the nation than gadflies are the kings of a 
horse ; they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do not 
guide it. They, and their courts, and their armies 15 
are, if one could see clearly, only a large species of 
marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melodious, 
bandmastered trumpeting, in the sumuier air ; the twilight 
being, perhaps, sometimes fairer, but hardly more wholesome, 
for its glittering mists of midge companies. The true kings, 20 
meanwhile, rule quietly, if at all, and hate ruling; too many 
of them make " il gran rifiuto " ; and if they do not, the 
mob, as soon as they are likely to become useful to it, is 
pretty sure to make Us " gran rifiuto '^ of them. 

44. Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some 25 
day, if ever day comes when he will estimate his dominion 
by the force of it, — not the geographical boundaries. It 
matters very little whether Trent cuts you a cantel out here, 
or Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it does matter 
to you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this man 30 
" Go," and he goeth ; and to another, "Come," and he.cometh. 
Whether you can turn your people, as you can Trent — and 
where it is that you bid them come, and where go. It 
matters to you, king of men, whether your people hate you, 
and die by you, or love you, and live by you. You may ;'.5 



6Q SESAME AND LILIES. 

measure your dominion by multitudes, better than by miles ; 
and count degrees of love-latitude, not from, but to, a won- 
derfully warm and infinite equator. 

45. Measure ! — nay, you cannot measure. Who shall 
5 measure the difference between the power of those who " do 

and teach," and who are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, 
as of heaven — and the power of those who undo, and con- 
sume — whose power, at the fullest, is only the power of 
the moth and the rust ? Strange ! to think how the Moth- 

10 kings lay up treasures for the moth; and the Rust-kings, 
who are to their people's strength as rust to armor, lay up 
treasures for the rust ; and the Robber-kings, treasures for 
the robber ; but how few kings have ever laid up treasures 
that needed no guarding — treasures of which, the more 

15 thieves there were, the better ! Broidered robe, only to be 
rent; helm and sword, only to be dimmed; jewel and gold, 
only to be scattered ; — there have been three kinds of kings 
who have gathered these. Suppose there ever should arise 
a Fourth order of kings, who had read, in some obscure 

20 writing of long ago, that there was a Fourth kind of treasure, 
which the jewel and gold could not equal, neither should it 
be valued with pure gold. A web made fair in the weaving, 
by Athena's shuttle ; an armor forged, in divine fire by Vul- 
canian force ; a gold to be mined in the very sun's red heart, 

25 where he sets over the Delphian cliffs ; — deep-pictured 
tissue ; — impenetrable armor ; — potable gold ; — the three 
great Angels of Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still calling to 
us, and waiting at the post of our doors, to lead us, with their 
winged power, and guide us, with their vmerring eyes, by 

30 the path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's 
eye has not seen! Suppose kings should ever arise, who 
heard and believed this word, and at last gathered and 
brought forth treasures of — Wisdom — for their people? 

46. Think what an amazing business that would be ! 
35 How inconceivable, in the state of our present national 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 67 

wisdom ! That we should bring up our peasants to a 
book exercise instead of a bayonet exercise ! — organize, 
drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of 
thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers ! — find national 
amusement in reading-rooms as well as rifle-grounds ; give 5 
prizes for a fair shot at a fact, as well as for a leaden 
splash on a target. What an absurd idea it seems, put 
fairly in words, that the wealth of the capitalists of civil- 
ized nations should ever come to support literature instead 
of war ! 10 

47. Have yet patience with me, while I read you a single 
sentence out of the only book, properly to be called a book, 
that I have yet written myself, the one that will stand (if 
anything stand), surest and longest of all work of mine : — 

" It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in 15 
Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports 
unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much money to sup- 
port them ; for most of the men who wage such, wage them 
gratis ; but for an unjust war, men's bodies and souls have 
both to be bought ; and the best tools of war for them besides, 20 
which makes such war costly to the maximum ; not to speak 
of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations 
which have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multi- 
tudes to buy an hour's peace of mind with ; as, at present, 
France and England, purchasing of each other ten millions 25 
sterling w^orth of consternation, annually (a remarkably light 
crop, half thorns and half aspen leaves, sown, reaped, and 
granaried by the 'science' of the modern political economist, 
teaching covetousness instead of tn;th). And, all unjust 
war being supportable, if not by pillage of the enemy, so 
only by loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid by 
subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to have no 
will in the matter, the capitalists' will being the primary 
root of the w^ar; but its real root is the covetousness of 
the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frankness, 35 



68 SESAME AND LILIES. 

or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, his 
own separate loss and punishment to each person." 

48. France and England literally, observe, buy panic of 
each other; they pay, each of them, for ten thousand- 

5 thousand pounds' worth of terror, a year. Now suppose, 
instead of buying these ten millions' worth of panic annu- 
ally, they made up their minds to be at peace with each 
other, and buy ten millions' worth of knowledge annually ; 
and that each nation spent its ten thousand-thousand pounds 

10 a year in founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal 
museums, royal gardens, and places of rest. Might it not 
be better somewhat for both French and English ? 

49. It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. Never- 
theless, I hope it will not be long before royal or national 

15 libraries will be founded in every considerable city, with a 
royal series of books in them ; the same series in every one 
of them, chosen books, the best in every kind, prepared for 
that national series in the most perfect way possible ; their 
text printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, and 

20 divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful, 
and strong, and thorough as examples of binders' work ; and 
that these great libraries will be accessible to all clean and 
orderly persons at all times of the day and evening ; strict 
law being enforced for this cleanliness and quietness. 

25 50. I could shape for you other plans, for art galleries, 
and for natural history galleries, and for many precious — 
many, it seems to me, needful — things ; but this book plan 
is the easiest and needfullest, and would prove a considera- 
ble tonic to what we call our British Constitution, which 

30 has fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil thirst, and evil 
hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn 
laws repealed for it ; try if you cannot get corn laws estab- 
lished for it, dealing in a better bread ; — bread made of 
that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens 

.35 doors ; — doors, not of robbers,' but of Kings' Treasuries. 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 69 

Note to § 30. 

Kespecting the increase of rent by the deaths of the 
poor, for evidence of which, see the preface to the Medical 
Officer's report to the Privy Council, just published, there 
are suggestions in its preface which will make some stir 
among us, I fanc}'', respecting which let me note these points 5 
following : — 

There are two theories on the Subject of land now abroad, 
and in contention ; both false. 

The first is that, by Heavenly law, there have always 
existed, and must continue to exist, a certain number of lO 
hereditarily sacred persons to v/hom the earth, air, and 
water of the world belong, as personal property ; of which 
earth, air, and water, these persons may, at their pleasure, 
permit, or forbid, the rest of the human race to eat, to 
breathe, or to drink. This theory is not for many years 15 
longer tenable. The adverse theory is that a division of 
the land of the world among the mob of the world would 
immediately elevate the said mob into sacred personages ; 
that houses would then build themselves, and corn grow of 
itself ; and that everybody would be able to live, without 20 
doing any work for his living. This theory would also be 
found highly untenable in practice. 

It will, however, require some rough experiments and 
rougher catastrophes, before the generality of persons will 
be convinced that no law concerning anything — least of all 25 
concerning land, for either holding or dividing it, or renting 
it high, or renting it low — would be of the smallest ulti- 
mate use to the people, so long as the general contest for 
life, and for the means of life, remains one of mere brutal 
competition. That contest, in an unprincipled nation, will 30 
take one deadly form or another, whatever laws you make 
against it. For instance, it would be an entirely wholesome 
law for England, if it could be carried, that maximum limits 



70 SESAME AND LILIES. 

should be assigned to incomes according to classes ; and that 
every nobleman's income should be paid to him as a fixed 
salary or pension by the nation ; and not squeezed by him 
in variable sums, at discretion, out of the tenants of his 

5 land. But if you could get such a law passed to-morrow, 
and if, which would be farther necessary, you could fix the 
value of the assigned incomes by making a given weight of 
pure bread for a given sum, a twelve-month would not pass 
before another currency would have been tacitly established, 

10 and the power of accumulated wealth would have reasserted 
itself in some other article, or some other imaginary sign. 
There is only one cure for public distress — and that is pub- 
lic education, directed to make men thoughtful, merciful, 
and just. There are, indeed, many laws conceivable which 

15 would gradually better and strengthen the national temper; 
but, for the most part, they are such as the national temper 
must be much bettered before it would bear. A nation in 
its youth may be helped by laws, as a weak child by back- 
boards, but when it is old it cannot that way strengthen its 

20 crooked spine. 

And besides, the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye 
one ; distribute the earth as you will, the principal question 
remains inexorable, — Who is to dig it? Which of us, in 
brief word, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest — 

25 and for what pay ? Who is to do the pleasant and clean 
work, and for what pay ? Who is to do no work, and for 
what pay ? And there are curious moral and religioiis 
questions connected with these. How far is it lawful to 
suck a portion of the soul out of a great many persons, in 

30 order to put the abstracted psychical quantities together and 
make one very beautiful or ideal soul ? If we had to deal 
with mere blood instead of spirit, (and the thing might 
literally be done — as it has been done with infants before 
now) — so that it were possible by taking a certain quantity 

35 of blood from the arms of a given number of the mob, and 



I. OF kings' treasuries. 71 

putting it all into one person, to make a more azure-blooded 
gentleman of him, the thing would of course be managed ; 
but secretly, I should conceive. But now, because it is 
brain and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, it can 
be done quite openly, and we live, we gentlemen, on deli- 5 
catest prey, after the manner of weasels ; that is to say, 
we keep a certain number of clowns digging and ditching, 
and generally stupefied, in order that we, being fed gratis, 
may have all the thinking and feeling to ourselves. Yet 
there is a great deal to be said for this. A highly-bred and lo 
trained English, French, Austrian, or Italian gentleman 
(much more a lady), is a great production, — a better pro- 
duction than most statues; being beautifully colored as 
well as shaped, and plus all the brains ; a glorious thing to 
look at, a wonderful thing to talk to ; and you cannot have 15 
it, any more than a pyramid or a church, but by sacrifice 
of much contributed life. And it is, perhaps, better to build 
a beautiful human creature than a beautiful dome or steeple 
— and more delightful to look up reverently to a creature 
far above us, than to a wall; only the beautiful human 20 
creature will have some duties to do in return — duties of 
living belfry and rampart — of which presently. 



LECTURE II. — LILIES. 

OF queens' gardens. 

"Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert; let the desert be made cheerful, 
and bloom as the lily ; and the barren places of Jordan shall run wild 
with wood." — Isaiah XXXV. 1. (Septuagint.) 

51. It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is the sequel 

of one previously given, that I should shortly state to you 

my general intention in both. The questions specially 

■ proposed to you in the first, namely, How and What to 

5 Head, rose out of a far deeper one, which it was my en- 
deavor to make you propose earnestly to yourselves, namely, 
Why to Head. I want you to feel, with me, that whatever 
advantage we possess in the present day in the diffusion of 
education and of literature, can only be rightly used by any 

10 of us when we have apprehended clearly what education is 
to lead to, and literature to teach. I wish you to see that 
both well-directed moral training and well-chosen reading 
lead to the possession of a power over the ill-guided and 
illiterate, which is, according to the measure of it, in the 

15 truest sense, kingly; conferring indeed the purest kingship 
that can exist among men.: too many other kingships (how- 
ever distinguished by visible insignia or material power) 
being either spectral, or tyrannous ; — spectral — that is to 
say, aspects and shadows only of royalty, hollow as death, 

20 and which only the " likeness of a kingly crown have on " ; 
or else tyrannous — that is to say, substituting their own 
will for the law of justice and love by which all true kings 
rule. 

72 



II. OF queens' gardens. 73 

52. There is, then, I repeat — and as I want to leave this 
idea with you, I begin with it, and shall end with it"^:^ only- 
one pure kind of kingship ; an inevitable and eternal kind, 
crowned or not : the kingship, namely, which consists in a 
stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that 5 
of others ; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise 
them. Observe that word " State " ; we have got into a 
loose way of iising it. It means literally the standing and 
stability of a thing; and you have the full force of it in the 
derived word " statue " — " the immovable thing." A king's 10 
majesty or " state," then, and the right of his kingdom to 
be called a state, depends on the movelessness of both : — 
without tremor, without quiver of balance ; established and 
enthroned upon a foundation of eternal law which nothing 
can alter, nor overthrow. ■ 15 

53. Believing that all literature and all education are only 
useful so far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, 
and therefore kingly, power, — first, over ourselves, and, 
through ourselves, over all around us, — I am now going to 
ask you to consider with me, farther, what special portion or 20 
kind of this royal authority, arising out of noble education, 
may rightly be possessed by women ; and how far they also 
are called to a true queenly power, — not in their households 
merely, but over all within their sphere. And in what 
sense, if they rightly understood and exercised this royal 25 
or gracious influence, the order and beauty induced by such 
benignant power would justify us in speaking of the terri- 
tories over which each of them reigned, as *' Queens' 
Gardens." 

54. And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far 30 
deeper question, which — strange though this may seem — 
remains among many of us yet quite undecided, in spite of 
its infinite importance. 

We cannot determine what the queenly power of women 
should be, until we are agreed what their ordinary power 35 



74 SESAME AND LILIES, 

should be. We cannot consider how education may fit them 
for any widely extending duty, until we are agreed what is 
their true constant duty. And there never was a time when 
wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagination per- 

5 mitted, respecting this question — quite vital to all social 
happiness. The relations of the womanly to the manly 
nature, their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, 
seem never to have been yet estimated with entire consent. 
We hear of the " mission " and of the " rights " of Woman, 

10 as if these could ever be separate from the mission and the 
rights of Man ; — as if she and her lord were creatures of 
independent kind, and of irreconcilable claim. This, at 
least, is wrong. And not less wrong — perhaps even more 
foolishly wrong (for I will anticipate thus far what I hope 

15 to prove) — is the idea that woman is only the shadow and 
attendant image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and 
servile obedience, and supported altogether in her weakness, 
by the preeminence of his fortitude. 

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting 

20 her who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he 
could be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a 
slave ! 

55. Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some 
clear and harmonious idea (it must be harmonious if it is 

25 true) of what womanly mind and virtue are in power and 
office, with respect to man's ; and how their relations, 
rightly accepted, aid, and increase, the vigor, and honor, 
and authority of both. 

And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last 

30 lecture : namely, that the first use of education was to 
enable us to consult with the wisest and the greatest men 
on all points of earnest difficulty. That to use books 
rightly, was to go to them for help : to appeal to them 
when our own knowledge and power of thought failed : 

35 to be led by them into wider sight, — purer conception, — 



^ 



II. OF queens' gardens. 75, 

than our own, and receive from them the united sentence of 
the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and 
unstable opinion. 

Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest, the 
wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any wise 5 
on this point: let us hear the testimony they have left re- 
specting what they held to be the true dignity of woman, 
and her mode of help to man. 

56. And first let us take Shakespeare. 

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes; — lo 
he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic 
figure in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry 
the Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of the stage; and 
the still slighter Valentine in the Two Gentlemen of 
Verona. In his labored and perfect plays you have no 15 
hero. Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had 
not, been so great as to leave him the prey of every base 
practice round him ; but he is the only example even 
approximating to the heroic type. Coriolanus — Caesar — 
Antony stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities; 20 
— Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative ; Romeo an 
impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submis- 
sive to adverse fortune ; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely 
noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true 
use at the critical time, and he sinks into the office of a 25 
servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing 
toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, by Rosalind. 
Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect 
woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless purpose; 
Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen 30 
Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and 
last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless ; 
conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity. 

57. Then observe, secondly. 

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the 35 



76 SESAME AND LILIES. 

folly or fault of a man ; the redemption, if there be any, 
is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, 
there is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to 
his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his mis- 

5 understanding of his children ; the virtue of his one true 
daughter would have saved him from all the injuries of the 
others, unless he had cast her away from him ; as it is, she 
all but saves him. 

Of Othello I need not trace the tale ; nor the one weak- 

10 ness of his so mighty love ; nor the inferiority of his percep- 
tive intellect to that even of the second woman character in 
the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony against 
his error : — 

"Oh, murderous coxcomb ! what should such a fool 
15 Do with so good a wife ? " 

In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and brave stratagem of 
the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless impa- 
tience of her husband. In The Winter's Tale, and in 
Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of two princely 

20 households, lost through long years, and imperilled to the 
death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are 
redeemed at last by the queenly patience and wisdom of 
the wives. In Measure for Measure, the foul injustice 
of the judge, and the foul cowardice of the brother, are 

25 opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine purity of a 
woman. In Coriolanus, the mother's counsel, acted upon 
in time, would have saved her son from all evil ; his momen- 
tary forgetfulness of it is his ruin ; her prayer, at last, 
granted, saves him — not, indeed, from death, but from the 

30 curse of living as the destroyer of his country. 

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the 
fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked child ? — of 
Helena, against the petulance and insult of a careless 
youth ? — of the patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice, 



II. OF queens' gardens. 77 

and the calmly devoted wisdom of the " unlessoned girl," 
who appears among the helplessness, the blindness, and 
the vindictive passions of men, as a gentle angel, bringing 
courage and safety by her presence, and defeating the 
worst malignities of crime by what women are fancied 5 
most to fail in, — precision and accuracy of thought. 

58. Observe, further, among all the principal figures in 
Shakespeare's plays, there is only one weak woman — 
Ophelia ; and it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical 
moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to lO 
him when he needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe 
follows. Finally, though there are three wicked women 
among the principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Regan, and 
Goneril, they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to 
the ordinary laws of life ; fatal in their influence also, in 15 
proportion to the power for good which they have abandoned. 

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testimony to the 
position and character of women in human life. He repre- 
sents them as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, — 
incorruptibly just and pure examples, — strong always to 20 
sanctify, even when they cannot save. 

59. Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the 
nature of man, — still less in his understanding of the 
causes and courses of fate, — but only as the writer who 
has given us the broadest view of the conditions and modes 25 
of ordinary thought in modern society, I ask you next to 
receive the witness of Walter Scott. 

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no 
value, and though the early romantic poetry is very beauti- 
ful, its testimony is of no weight, other than that of a boy's 30 
ideal. But his true works, studied from Scottish life, bear 
a true witness ; and, in the whole range of these, there are 
but three men who reach the heroic type * — Dandie Din- 

* I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, to have 
noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of other great charac- 



78 SESAME AND LILIES. 

mont, Rob Roy, and Claverhouse ; of these, one is a border 
farmer ; another a freebooter ; the third a soldier in a bad 
cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only in their 
courage and faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, 

5 or mistakenly applied, intellectual power ; while his younger 
men are the gentlemanly playthings of fantastic fortune, 
and only by aid (or accident) of that fortune, survive, not 
vanquish, the trials they involuntarily sustain. 01 any 
disciplined, or consistent character, earnest in a purpose 

10 wisely conceived, or dealing with forms of hostile evil, 
definitely challenged and resolutely subdued, there is no 
trace in his conceptions of young men. Whereas in his 
imaginations of women, — in the characters of Ellen Doug- 
las, of Flora Maclvor, Rose Bradwardine, Catherine Seyton, 

15 Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice 
Lee, and Jeanie Deans, — with endless varieties of grace, 
tenderness, and intellectual power, we find in all a quite 
infallible sense of dignity and justice; a fearless, instant, 
and untiring self-sacrifice, to even the appearance of duty, 

20 much more to its real claims; and, finally, a patient wisdom 
of deeply -restrained affection, which does infinitely more than 
protect its objects from a momentary error; it gradually 
forms, animates, and exalts the characters of the unworthy 
lovers, until, at the close of the tale, we are just able, and 

25 no more, to take patience in hearing of their unmerited 
success. 

So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it 
is the woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the 
youth ; it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches 

30 over, or educates, his mistress. 

ters of men in the Waverley novels — the selfishness and narrowness of 
thought in Redgauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm in Edward Glen- 
dinning, and the like ; and I ought to have noticed that there are several 
quite perfect characters sketched sometimes in the backgrounds; three — 
let us accept joyously this courtesy to England and her soldiers — are Eng- 
lish officers : Colonel Gardiner, Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Maunering. 



II. OF queens' gardens. 79 

60. Next, take, though more briefly, graver testimony — 
that of the great Italians and Greeks. You know well the 
plan of Dante's great poem — that it is a love-poem to his 
dead lady ; a song of praise for her watch over his soul. 
Stooping only to pity, never to love, she yet saves him from 5 
destruction — saves him from hell. He is going eternally 
astray in despair ; she comes down from heaven to his help, 
and throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, inter- 
preting for him the most difficult truths, divine and human ; 
and leading him, with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to 10 
star. 

I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; if I began, I 
coiild not cease: besides, you might think this a wild imag- 
ination of one poet's heart. So I will rather read to you a 
few verses of the deliberate writing of a knight of Pisa to 15 
his living lady, wholly characteristic of the feeling of all 
the noblest men of the thirteenth, or early fourteenth, cen- 
tury, preserved among many other such records of knightly 
honor and love, which Dante Rossetti has gathered for us 
from among the early Italian poets. 20 

"For lo ! thy law is passed 
That this my love should manifestly be 

To serve and honor thee : 
And so I do ; and my delight is full, 
Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 25 

"Without almost, I am all rapturous, 
Since thus my will was set : 
To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence : 
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 

A pain or a regret. 30 

But on thee dwells my every thought and sense ; 
Considering that from thee all virtues spread 

As from a fountain head, — 
That in thy gift is loisdoni^s best avail, 

And honor xoithout fail / 35 



80 SESAME AND LILIES. 

With whom each sovereign good dwells separate, 
Fultilling the perfection of thy state. 

"Lady, since I conceived 
Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart, 
5 Mil life has been apart 

In shining brightness and the place of truth; 

Which till that time, good sooth, 
Groped among shadows in a darkenM place, 
Where many hours and days 
10 It hardly ever had remember'd good. 

But now my servitude 
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 

A man from a wild beast 
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 

15 61. You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have 
had a lower estimate of women than this Christian lover. 
His spiritual subjection to them was indeed not so absolute ; 
but as regards their own personal character, it was only 
because you could not have followed me so easily, that I did 

20 not take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare's; and 
instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty and faith, 
the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache ; the 
divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kind- 
ness and simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa ; the house- 

25 wifely calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon the 
sea ; the ever patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of 
the sister and daughter, in Antigone ; the bowing down of 
Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent; and, finally, the expecta- 
tion of the resurrection, made clear to the soul of the 

30 Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, 
to save her husband, had passed calmly through the bitter- 
ness of death. 

62. Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind 
upon you if I had time. I would take Chaucer, and show you 

35 why he wrote a Legend of Good Women ; but no Legend of Good 



II. OF queens' gardens. 81 

Men. I would take Spenser, and show you how all his fairy 
knights are sometimes deceived and sometimes vanquished ; 
but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the spear of 
Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could go back into the 
mythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you 5 
how the great people, — by one of whose princesses it was 
appointed that the Lawgiver of all the earth should be edu- 
cated, rather than by his own kindred : — how that great 
Egyptian people, wisest tlien of nations, gave to their Spirit 
of Wisdom the form of a woman ; and into her hand, for a 10 
symbol, the weaver's shuttle ; and now the name and the 
form of that spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed by the 
Greeks, became that Athena of the olive-helm, and cloudy 
shield, to faith in whom you owe, down to this date, what- 
ever you hold most precious in art, in literature, or in types 15 
of national virtue. 

63. But I will not wander into this distant and mythical 
element ; I will only ask you to give its legitimate value to 
the testimony of these great poets and men of the world, — 
consistent, as you see it is, on this head. I will ask you 20 
whether it can be supposed that these men, in the main work 
of their lives, are amusing themselves with a fictitious and 
idle view of the relations betAveen man and woman ; nay, 
worse than fictitious or idle ; for a thing may be imaginary, 
yet desirable, if it were possible; but this, their ideal of 25 
woman, is, according to our common idea of the marriage 
relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, Ave say, is not to 
guide, nor even to think for herself. The man is always 
to be the Aviser ; he is to be the thinker, the ruler, the supe- 
rior in knoAvledge and discretion, as in power. 30 

64. Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on 
this matter ? Are all these great men mistaken, or are we ? 
Are Shakespeare and ^schylus, Dante and Homer, merely 
dressing dolls for us ; or, Avorse than dolls, unnatural visions, 
the realization of Avhich, Avere it possible, Avould bring anarchy 35 



82 SESAME AND LILIES. 

into all households and ruin into all affections ? Nay, if 
you can suppose this, take lastly the evidence of facts given 
by the human heart itself. In all Christian ages which have 
been remarkable for their purity of progress, there has been 

5 absolute yielding of obedient devotion, by the lover, to his 
mistress. I say obedient; — not merely enthusiastic and 
worshipping in imagination, but entirely subject, receiving 
fronr the beloved woman, however young, not only the en- 
couragement, the praise, and the reward of all toil, but, so 

10 far as any choice is open, or any question difficult of decision, 
the direction of all toil. That chivalry, to the abuse and 
dishonor of which are attribxitable primarily whatever is 
cruel in war, unjust in peace, or corrupt and ignoble in 
domestic relations; and to the original purity and power 

15 of which we owe the defence alike of faith, of law, and of 
love ; — that chivalry, I say, in its very first conception of 
honorable life, assumes the subjection of the young knight 
to the command — should it even be the command in caprice 
— of his lady. It assumes this, because its masters knew 

20 that the first and necessary impulse of every truly taught 
and knightly heart is this of blind service to its lady : that 
where that true faith and captivity are not, all wayward and 
wicked passion must be ; and that in this rapturous obedi- 
ence to the single love of his youth, is the sanctification of 

25 all man's strength, and the continuance of all his purposes. 
And this, not because such obedience would be safe, or hon- 
orable, were it ever rendered to the unworthy ; but because 
it ought to be impossible for every noble youth — it is im- 
possible for every one rightly trained — to love any one 

30 whose gentle counsel he cannot trust, or whose prayerful 
command he can hesitate to obey. 

65. I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for 
I think it should commend itself at once to your knowledge 
of what has been, and to your feeling of what should be. 

35 You cannot think that the buckling on of the knight's 



II. OP queens' gardens. 83 

armour by Ids lady's hand Avas a mere caprice of romantic 
fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth — that the 
soul's armour is never well set to the heart unless a woman's 
hand has braced it ; and it is only when she braces it loosely 
that the honor of manhood fails. Know you not those lovely 5 
lines — I Avould they were learned by all youthful ladies of 
England — 

" Ah, wasteful woman ! — she who may 

On her sweet self set her own price, 

Knowing he cannot choose but pay — 10 

How has she cheapen'd Paradise ! 

How given for nought her priceless gift, 

How spoiPd the bread and spill'd the wine. 

Which, spent with due respective thrift, 

Had made brutes men, and men divine ! " * 15 

66. Thus much, then, respecting the relations of lovers 
I believe you will accept. But what we too often doubt 
is the fitness of the continuance of such a relation through- 
out the whole of human life. We think it right in the 
lover and mistress, not in the husband and wife. That 20 
is to say, we think that a reverent and tender duty is 
due to one whose affection we still doubt, and whose char- 
acter we as yet do but partially and distantly discern; 
and that this reverence and duty are to be withdrawn, 
when the affection has become wholly and limitlessly our 25 
own, and the character has been so sifted and tried that 
we fear not to entrust it with the happiness of our lives. 
Do you not see how ignoble this is, as well as how unrea- 
sonable ? Do you not feel that marriage, — when it is 
marriage at all, — is only the seal which marks the vowed 30 
transition of temporary into untiring service, and of fitful 
into eternal love? 

* Coventry Patmore. You cannot read him too often or too carefully ; 
as far as I know, he is the only living poet who always strengthens and 
purifies; the others sometimes darken, and nearly always depress, and 
discourage the imagination they deeply seize. 



84 SfiSAME AND LILIES. 

67. But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding 
function of the woman reconcilable with a true wifely s;ib- 
jection? Simply in that it is a gnlding, not a determining, 
function. Let me try to show you briefly how these powers 

5 seem to be rightly distinguishable. 

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking 
of the " superiority " of one sex to the other, as if they 
could be compared in similar things. Each has what the 
other has not: each completes the other, and is completed 

10 by the other : they are in nothing alike, and the happiness 
and perfection of both depends on each asking, and receiv- 
ing from the other what the other only can give. 

68. Now their separate characters are briefly these. The 
man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is emi- 

isnently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. 
His intellect is for speculation and invention ; his energy 
for adventure, for war, and for conquest wherever war is 
just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's power 
is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not for 

20 invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, 
and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, 
and their places. Her great function is Praise : she enters 
into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. 
By her oftice, and place, she is protected from all danger and 

25 temptation. The man, in his rough work in the open world, 
must encounter all peril and trial : — to him, therefore, must 
be the failure, the offence, the inevitable error : often he 
must be wounded, or subdued ; often misled ; and always 
hardened. But he guards the woman from all this ; within 

30 his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, 
need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or 
offence. This is the true nature of home — it is the place 
of Peace ; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all 
terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is 

35 not home ; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate 



II. OF queens' gardens. 85 

into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, 
or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either 
husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home ; 
it is then only a part of that outer world which you have 
roofed over, and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred 5 
place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over 
by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but 
those whom they can receive with love, — so far as it is 
this, and roof and fire are types only of a nobler shade and 
light, — shade as of the rock in a weary land, and light as 10 
of the Pharos in the stormy sea ; — so far it vindicates the 
name, and fulfils the praise, of Home. 

And Avherever a true wife comes, this home is always 
round her. The stars only may be over her head ; the 
glowworm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at 15 
her foot: but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble 
woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with 
cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light 
far, for those who else were homeless. 

69. This, then, I believe to be, — will you not admit it to 20 
be ? — the woman's true place and power. But do not you 
see that, to fulfil this, she must — as far as one can use 
such terms of a human creature — be incapable of error? 
So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She 
must be enduringly, incorruptibly good ; instinctively, 25 
infallibly wise — wise, not for self -development, but for 
self-renunciation : wise, not that she may set herself above 
her husband, but that she may never fail from his side : 
wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, 
but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, 30 
because infinitely applicable, modesty of service — the true 
changefulness of woman. In that great sense — " La donna 
e mobile," not " Qual piiim' al vento " ; no, nor yet " Varia- 
ble as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made " ; but 
variable as the light, manifold in fair and serene division, 35 



86 SESAME AND LILIES. 

that it may take the color of all that it falls upon, and 
exalt it. 

70. II. I have been trying, thns far, to show you what 
should be the place, and what tlie power, of woman. Now, 

5 secondly, we ask. What kind of education is to lit her for 
these ? 

And if you indeed think this a true conception of her 
office and dignity, it will not be difficult to trace the course 
of education which would fit her for the one, and raise her to 

10 the other. 

The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful persons 
now doubt this, — is to secure for her such physical train- 
ing and exercise as may confirm her health, and perfect her 
beauty ; the highest refinement of that beauty being un- 

15 attainable without splendor of activity and of delicate 
strength. To perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its 
power ; it cannot be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light 
too far : only remember that all physical freedom is vain to 
produce beauty without a corresponding freedom of heart. 

20 There are two passages of that poet who is distinguished, 
it Seems to me, from all others — not by power, but by ex- 
quisite Tightness — which point you to the source, and de- 
scribe to you, in a few syllables, the completion of womanly 
beavity. I will read the introductory stanzas, but the last is 

25 the one I wish you specially to notice : — 

' ' Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower 

' On earth was never sown ; 
' This child I to myself will take ; 
30 ' She shall be mine, and I will make 

' A lady of my own. 

" ' Myself will to my darling be 
' Both law and impulse ; and with me 
' The girl, in rock and plain, 



IT. OF queens' hardens. 87 

'In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
' Shall feel an overseeing power 
t ' To kindle, or restrain. 

" 'The floating clouds their state shall lend 
' To her, for her the willow bend ; 5 

' Nor shall she fail to see 
' Even in the motions of the storm, 
' Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 

' By silent sympathy. 

" ' And vital feelings of delight 10 

' Shall rear her form to stately height, — 

' Her virgin bosom swell. 
' Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, 
' While she and I together live, 

' Here in this happy dell.' " * 15 

" Vital feelings of delight," observe. There are deadly 
feelings of delight; but the natural ones are vital, neces- 
sary to very life. 

And they must be feelings of delight, if they are to be 
vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely, if you do 20 
not make her happy. There is not one restraint you put 
on a good girl's nature — there is not one check you give 
to her instincts of affection or of effort — v^hich will not be 
indelibly written on her features, with a hardness which is 
all the more painful because it takes away the brightness 25 
from the eyes of innocence, and the charm from the brow 
of virtue. 

71. This for the means : now note the end. Take from 



the same poet, in two lines, a perfect ^^cr^won of 
womanly beauty — so 

" A countenance in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet." 

♦Observe, it is " Nature " who is speaking throughout, and who says, 
" while she and I together live." 



88 SESAME AND LILIES. 

The perfect loveliness of a woman's countenance can only 
consist in that majestic peace which is founded in memory 
of happy and useful years, — full of sweet records ; and 
from the joining of this with that yet more majestic child- 

5 ishness, which is still full of change and promise ; — open- 
ing always — modest at once, and bright, with hope of 
better things to be won, and to be bestowed. There is no 
old age where there is still that promise. 

72. Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical 

10 frame, and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, 
to fill and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts 
which tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and 
refine its natural tract of love. 

All such knowledge should be given her as may enable 

15 her to understand, and even to aid, the work of men : and 
yet it should be given, not as knowledge, — not as if it were, 
or could be, for her an object to know ; but only to feel, and 
to judge. It is of no moment, as a matter of pride or per- 
fectness in herself, whether she knows many languages or 

20oue; but it is of the utmost, that she should be able to show 
kindness to a stranger, and to understand the sweetness of 
a stranger's tongue. It is of no moment to her own worth 
or dignity that she should be acquainted with this science 
or that; but it is of the highest that she should be trained 

25 in habits of accurate thought ; that she should understand 
the meaning, the inevitableness, and the loveliness of natural 
laws ; and follow at least some one path of scientific attain- 
ment, as far as to the threshold of that bitter Valley of 
Humiliation, into which only the wisest and bravest of men 

30 can descend, owning themselves forever children, gathering 
pebbles on a boundless shore. It is of little consequence 
how many positions of cities she knows, or how many dates 
of events, or names of celebrated persons — it is not the 
object of education to turn the woman into a dictionary ; 

35 but it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter 



IT. OF queens' gardens. 89 

with her whole personality into the history she reads ; to 
picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagina- 
tion; to apprehend, with her line instincts, the pathetic cir- 
cumstances and dramatic relations, which the historian too 
often only eclipses by his reasoning, and disconnects by his 5 
arrangement : it is for her to trace the hidden equities of 
divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness, of the 
fatefvd threads of woven tire that connect error with retri- 
bution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend 
the limits of her sympathy with respect to that history 10 
which is being forever determined as the moments pass in 
which she draws her peaceful breath ; and to the contempo- 
rary calamity, which, were it but rightly mourned by her, 
Avould recur no more hereafter. She is to exercise herself 
in imagining what would be the effects upon her mind and 15 
conduct, if she were daily brought into the presence of the 
suffering which is not the less real because shut from her 
sight. She is to be taught somewhat to understand the 
nothingness of the proportion which that little world in 
which she lives and loves, bears to the world in which God 20 
lives and loves ; — and solemnly she is to be taught to strive 
that her thoughts of piety may not be feeble in proportion 
to the number they embrace, nor her prayer more languid 
than it is for the momentary relief from pain of her husband 
or her child, when it is uttered for the multitudes of those 25 
who have none to love them, — and is, '' for all who are 
desolate and oppressed." 

73. Thus far, I think, I have had your concurrence ; per- 
haps you will not be with me in what I believe is most need- 
ful for me to say. There is one dangerous science for 30 
women — one which they must indeed beware how they 
profanely touch — that of theology. Strange, and misera- 
bly strange, that while they are modest enough to doubt 
their powers, and pause at the threshold of sciences where 
every step is demonstrable and sure, they will plunge head- 35 



90 SESAME AND LILIES. 

long, and without one thought of incompetency, into that 
science in which the greatest men have trembled, and the 
wisest erred. Strange, that they will complacently and 
pridefully bind up whatever vice or folly there is in them, 

5 whatever arrogance, petulance, or blind incomprehensive- 
ness, into one bitter bundle of consecrated myrrh. Strange 
in creatures born to be Love visible, that where they can 
know least, they will condemn first, and think to recommend 
themselves to their Master, by crawling up the steps of His 

10 judgment-throne, to divide it with Him. Strangest of all, 
that they should think they were led by the Spirit of the 
Comforter into habits of mind which have become in them 
the unmixed elements of home discomfort ; and that they 
dare to turn the Household Gods of Christianity into ugly 

15 idols of their own ; — spiritual dolls, for them to dress 
according to their caprice ; and from which their husbands 
must turn away in grieved contempt, lest they should be 
shrieked at for breaking them. 

74. I believe, then, with this exception, that a girl's edu- 

20 cation should be nearly, in its course and material of study, 
the same as a boy's ; but quite differently directed. A 
woman, in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her 
husband is likely to know, but to know it in a different 
way. His command of it should be foundational and pro- 

25gressive; hers, general and accomplished for daily and 
helpful use. Not but that it would often be wiser in men 
to learn things in a womanly sort of way, for present use, 
and to seek for the discipline and training of their mental 
powers in such branches of study as will be afterwards 

30 fitted for social service ; but, speaking broadly, a man ought 
to know any language or science he learns, thoroughly — 
while a woman^ ought to know the same language, or science, 
only so far as may enable her to sympathize in her hus- 
band's pleasures, and in those of his best friends. 

35 75. Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far as she 



II. OF queens' gardens. 91 

reaches. There is a wide difference between elementary- 
knowledge and superficial knowledge — between a firm 
beginning, and an infirm attempt at compassing. A woman 
may always help her husband by what she knows, however 
little ; by what she half-knows, or mis-knows, she will only 5 
tease him. 

And indeed, if there were to be any difference between a 
girl's education and a boy's, I should say that of the two 
the girl should be earlier led, as her intellect ripens faster, 
into deep and serious subjects : and that her range of liter- 10 
ature should be, not more, but less frivolous ; calculated to 
add the qualities of patience and seriousness to her natural 
poignancy of thought and quickness of wit ; and also to 
keep her in a lofty and pure element of thought. I enter 
not now into any question of choice of books ; only let us 15 
be sure that her books are not heaped up in her lap as they 
fall out of the package of the circulating library, wet with 
the last and lightest spray of the fountain of folly. 

76. Or even of the fountain of wit ; for with respect to 
the sore temptation of novel reading, it is not the badness 20 
of a xiovel that we should dread, so much as its overwrought 
interest. The weakest romance is not so stupefying as the 
lower forms of religious exciting literature, and the worst 
romance is not so corrupting as false history, false phi- 
losophy, or false political essays. But the best romance 25 
becomes dangerous, if, by its excitement, it renders the 
ordinary course of life uninteresting, and increases the mor- 
bid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which we 
shall never be called upon to act. 

77. I speak therefore of good novels only ; and our 30 
modern literature is particularly rich in types of such. 
Well read, indeed, these books have serious use, being 
nothing less than treatises on moral anatomy and chemis- 
try ; studies of human nature in the elements of it. But I 
attach little weight to this function ; they are hardly ever 35 



92 SESAME AND LILIES. 

read with earnestness enough to permit them to fulfil it. 
The utmost they usually do is to enlarge somewhat the 
charity of a kind reader, or the bitterness of a malicious 
one ; for each will gather, from the novel, food for her own 

5 disposition. Those who are naturally proud and envious 
will learn from Thackeray to despise humanity ; those who 
are naturally gentle, to pity it; those who are naturally 
shallow, to laugh at it. So, also, there might be a service- 
able power in novels to bring before us, in vividness, a 

10 human truth which we had before dimly conceived ; but the 
temptation to picturesqueness of statement is so great, that 
often the best writers of fiction cannot resist it ; and our 
views are rendered so violent and one-sided, that their vital- 
ity is rather a harm than good. 

15 78. Without, however, venturing here on any attempt at 
decision how much novel reading should be allowed, let me 
at least clearly assert this, that whether novels, or poetry, 
or history be read, they should be chosen, not for their 
freedom from evil, but for their possession of good. The 

20 chance and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, 
or hide itself in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a 
noble girl; but the emptiness of an author oppresses her, 
and his amiable folly degrades her. And if she can have 
access to a good library of old and classical books, there 

25 need be no choosing at all. Keep the modern magazine and 
novel out of your girl's way ; turn her loose into the old 
library every wet day, and let her alone. She will find what 
is good for her ; you cannot ; for there is just this difference 
between the making of a girl's character and a boy's — you 

30 may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or 
hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would 
a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into any- 
thing. She grows as a flower does, — she will wither with- 
out sun ; she will decay in her sheath, as a narcissus will, if 

35 you do not give her air enough ; she may fall, and defile her 



ii. OF queens' gardens. 93 

head in dust, if you leave her without help at some moments 
of her life ; but you cannot fetter her ; she must take her 
own fair form and way, if she take any, and in mind as in 
body must have always 

"Her household motions light and free, 5 

And steps of virgin liberty." 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in the 
field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than 
you ; and the good ones too, and will eat some bitter and 
prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest lo 
thought would have been so. 

79. Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, and 
let her practice in all accomplishments be accurate and 
thorough, so as to enable her to understand more than she 
accomplishes. I say the finest models — that is to say, the 15 
truest, simplest, usef ullest. Note those epithets ; they will 
range through all the arts. Try them in music, where you 
might think them the least applicable. I say the truest, 
that in which the notes most closely and faithfully express 
the meaning of the words, or the character of intended 20 
emotion ; again, the simplest, that in which the meaning 
and melody are attained with the fewest and most signifi- 
cant notes possible ; and, finally, the usefullest, that music 
which makes the best words most beautiful, which enchants 
them in our memories each with its own glory of sound, and 25 
which applies them closest to the heart at the moment we 
need them. 

80. And not only in the material and in the course, 
but yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl's edu- 
cation be as serious as a boy's. You bring up your girls 30 
as if they were meant for sideboard ornaments, and then 
complain of their frivolity. Give them the same advan- 
tages that you give their brothers — appeal to the same 
grand instincts of virtue in them ; teach them, also, that 



94 SESAME AND LILIES. 

courage and truth are the pillars of their being : — do you 
think that they would not answer that appeal, brave and 
true as -they are even now, when you know that there is 
hardly a girls' school in this Christian kingdom where the 

5 children's courage or sincerity would be thought of half so 
much importance as their way of coming in at a door ; and 
when the whole system of society, as respects the mode of 
establishing them in life, is one rotten plague of cowardice 
and imposture — cowardice, in not' daring to let them live, 

10 or love, except as their neighbors choose; an imposture, in 
bringing, for the purposes of our own pride, the full glow 
of the world's worst vanity upon a girl's eyes, at the very 
period when the whole happiness of her future existence 
depends upon her remaining undazzled ? 

15 81. And give them, lastly, not only noble teachings, but 
noble teachers. You consider somewhat, before you send 
your boy to school, what kind of a man the master is ; — 
whatsoever kind of man he is, you at least give him full 
authority over your son, and show some respect to him 

20 yourself : — if he comes to dine with you, you do not put 
him at a side table: you know also that, at college, your 
child's immediate tutor will be under the direction of some 
still higher tutor, for whom you have absolute reverence. 
You do not treat the Dean of Christ Church or the Master 

25 of Trinity as your inferiors. 

But what teachers do you give your girls, and what 
reverence do you show to the teachers you have chosen ? 
Is a girl likely to think her own conduct, or her own 
intellect, of much importance, when you trust the entire 

30 formation of her character, moral and intellectual, to a 
person whom you let your servants treat with less respect 
than they do your housekeeper (as if the soul of your child 
were a less charge than jams and groceries), and whom you 
yourself think you confer an honor upon by letting her 

35 sometimes sit in the drawing-room in the evening ? 



II. OF QFEENS' GARDENS. 95 

82. Thus, then, of literature as her help and thus of art. 
There is one more help which she cannot do without — one 
which, alone, has sometimes done more than all other influ- 
ences besides, — the help of wild and fair nature. Hear this 
of the education of Joan of Arc : — 5 

" The education of this poor girl was mean, according to 
the present standard ; was ineffably grand, according to a 
purer philosophical standard; and only not good for our 
age, because for us it would be unattainable. . . . 

" Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to 10 
the advantages of her situation. The fountain of Domremy 
was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and it was haunted 
to that degree by fairies, that the parish priest (cure) was 
obliged to read mass there once a year, in order to keep 
them in decent bounds. ... 15 

"But the forests of Domremy — those were the glories 
of the land; for in them abode mysterious powers and 
ancient secrets that towered into tragic strength. Abbeys 
there were, and abbey windows, — ' like Moorish temples of 
the Hindoos,' — that exercised even princely power both in 20 
Touraine and in the German Diets. These had their sweet 
bells that pierced the forests for many a league at matins 
or vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, 
and scattered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no degree 
to disturb the deep solitude of the region ; yet many enough 25 
to spread a network or awning of Christian sanctity over 
what else might have seemed a heathen wilderness." * 

Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in England, woods 
eighteen miles deep to the centre ; but you can, perhaps, 
keep a fairy or two for your children yet, if you wish to 30 
keep them. But do you wish it ? Suppose you had each, 
at the back of your houses, a garden, large enough for your 
children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give 

* " Joan of Arc: in reference to M. Michelet's ' History of France.' " — 
De Quincey's Works, vol. iii., p. 217. 



96 SESAME AND LILIES. 

them room to run, — no more, — and that you could not 
change your abode; but that, if you chose, you coukl 
double your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal 
shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower- 
5 beds into heaps of coke. Would you do it ? I hope not. 
I can tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it 
gave you income sixty-fold instead of four-fold. 

83. Yet this is what you are doing with all England. 
The whole country is but a little garden, not more than 

10 enough for your children to run on the lawns of, if you 
would let them all run there. And this little garden you 
Avill turn into furnace ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, 
if you can ; and those children of yours, not you, will suffer 
for it. For the fairies will not be all banished ; there are 

15 fairies of the furnace as of the wood, and their first gift 
seems to be " sharp arrows of the mighty " ; but their last 
gifts are "coals of juniper." 

84. And yet I cannot — though there is no part of my 
subject that I feel more — press this upon you ; for we 

20 made so little use of the power of nature while we had it 
that we shall hardly feel what we have lost. Just on the 
other side of the Mersey you have your Snowdon, and your 
Menai Straits, and that mighty granite rock beyond the 
moors of Anglesea, splendid in its heathery crest, and foot 

25 planted in the deep sea, once thought of as sacred — a 
divine promontory, looking westward ; the Holy Head or 
Headland, still not without awe when its red light glares 
first through storm. These are the hills, and these the 
bays and blue inlets, which, among the Greeks, would have 

30 been always loved, always fateful in influence on the na- 
tional mind. That Snowdon is your Parnassus ; but where 
are its Muses ? That Holyhead mountain is your Island 
of ^gina ; but where is its Temple to Minerva ? 

85. Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva had 
35 achieved under the shadow of our Parnassus up to the 



IT. OF queens' gardens. 97 

year 1848? — Here is a little account of a Welsh school, 
from page 261 of the Keport on Wales, published by the 
Committee of Council on Education. This is a school close 
to a town containing 5000 persons : — 

" I then called up a larger class, most of whom had 5 
recently come to the school. Three girls repeatedly de- 
clared they had never heard of Christ, and two that they 
had never heard of God. Two out of six thought Christ 
was on earth now " (they might have had a worse thought 
perhaps), " three knew nothing about the Crucifixion. Four lo 
out of seven did not know the names of the months nor the 
number of days in a year. They had no notion of addition ; 
beyond two and two, or three and three, their minds were 
perfect blanks." 

Oh, ye women of England ! from the Princess of that 15 
Wales to the simplest of you, do not think your own 
children can be brought into their true fold of rest, while 
these are scattered on the hills, as sheep having no shep- 
herd. And do not think your daughters can be trained to 
the truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant 20 
places, which God made at once for their school-room and 
their play-ground, lie desolate and defiled. You cannot 
baptize them rightly in those inch-deep fonts of yours, 
unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which 
the great Lawgiver strikes forth forever from the rocks 25 
of your native land — waters which a Pagan would have 
worshipped in their purity, and you worship only with 
pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to 
those narrow axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the 
dark azure altars in heaven — the mountains that sustain 30 
your island throne, — mountains on which a Pagan would 
have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed 
cloud — remain for you without inscription ; altars built, 
not to, but by an Unknown God. 

86. III. Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of the 35 



98 SESAME AND LILIES. 

teaching, of woman, and thus of her household office, and 
queenliness. We come now to our last, our widest question, 
— What is her queenly office with respect to the state ? 
Generally, we are under an impression that a man's duties 

5 are public, and a woman's private. But this is not alto- 
gether so. A man has a personal work or duty, relating to 
his own home, and a public work or duty, which is the expan- 
sion of the other, relating to the state. So a woman has a 
personal work or duty, relating to her own home, and a 

10 public work or duty, which is also the expansion of that. 
Now, the man's work for his own home is, as has been 
said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and defence; the 
woman's to secure its order, comfort, and loveliness. 

Expand both these functions. The man's duty, as a 

15 member of a commonwealth, is to assist in the maintenance, 
in the advance, in the defence of the state. The woman's 
duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist in the 
ordering, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment 
of the state. 

20 What the man is at his own gate, defending it, if need be, 
against insult and spoil, that also, not in a less, but in a 
more devoted measure, he is to be at the gate of his country, 
leaving his home, if need be, even to the spoiler, to do his 
more incumbent work there. 

25 And, in like manner, what the woman is to be within her 
gates, as the centre of order, the balm of distress, and the 
mirror of beauty : that she is also to be without her gates, 
where order is more difficult, distress more imminent, loveli- 
ness more rare. 

30 And as within the human heart there is always set an 
instinct for all its real duties, — an instinct which you 
cannot quench, but only warp and corrupt if you withdraw 
it from its true purpose : — as there is the intense instinct of 
love, which, rightly disciplined, maintains all the sanctities 

35 of life, and, misdirected, undermines them ; and imist do 



II. OF queens' gardens. 99 

either the one or the other ; — so there is in the human 
heart an inextinguishable instinct, the love of power, which, 
rightly directed, maintains all the majesty of law and life, 
and, misdirected, Avrecks them, 

87. Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of man, 5 
and of the heart of woman, God set it there, and God keeps 
it there. Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the desire 
of power ! — For Heaven's sake, and for Man's sake, desire 
it all you can. But ivhat power ? That is all the question. 
Power to destroy ? the lion's limb and the dragon's breath ? 10 
Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide, and to guard. 
Power of the sceptre and shield ; the power of the royal 
hand that heals in touching, — that binds the fiend, and 
looses the captive ; the throne that is founded on the rock 
of Justice, and descended from only by steps of Mercy. 15 
Will you not covet such power as this, and seek such 
throne as this and be no more housewives, but queens ? 

88. It is now long since the women of England arrogated, 
universally, a title which once belonged to nobility only ; 
and, having once been in the habit of accepting the simple 20 
title 01 gentlewoman, as correspondent to that of gentleman, 
insisted on the privilege of assuming the title of " Lady," * 
which properly corresponds only to the title of " Lord." 

I do not blame them for this; but only for their narrow 
motive in this. I would have them desire and claim the 25 
title of Lady, provided they claim, not merely the title, but 
the office and duty signified by it. Lady means '' bread- 
giver" or " loaf -giver," and Lord means "maintainer of 

* I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted for our English 
youth of certain ranks, in which both boy and girl should receive, at a 
given age, their knighthood and ladyhood by true title ; attainable only 
by certain probation and trial both of character and accomplishment ; and 
to be forfeited, on conviction, by their peers, of any dishonorable act. 
Such au institution would be entirely, and with all noble results, possible, 
in a nation which loved honor. That it would not be possible among us, 
is not to the discredit of the scheme. 

LofC. 



100 SESAME AND LILIES. 

laws," and both titles have reference, not to the law which 
is maintained in the house, nor to the bread which is given 
to the household ; but to law maintained for the multitude, 
and to bread broken among the multitude. So that a Lord 

5 has legal claim only to his title in so far as he is the main- 
tainer of the justice of the Lord of Lords ; and a Lady has 
legal claim to her title, only so far as she communicates 
that help to the poor representatives of her Master, which 
women once, ministering to Him of their substance, were 

10 permitted to extend to that Master Himself; and when she 
is known, as He Himself once was, in breaking of bread. 

89. And this beneficent and legal dominion, this power cf " 
the Dominus, or House-Lord, and of the Domina, or House- 
Lady, is great and venerable, not in the number of those 

15 through whom it has lineally descended, but in the number 
of those whom it grasps within its sway ; it is always re- 
garded with reverent worship wherever its dynasty is 
founded on its duty, and its ambition correlative with its 
beneficence. Your fancy is pleased with the thought of 

20 being noble ladies, with a train of vassals? Be it so; you 
cannot be too noble, and your train cannot be too great; but 
see to it that your train is of vassals whom you serve and 
feed, not merely of slaves who serve and feed yon; and 
that the multitude which obeys you is of those whom you 

25 have comforted, not oppressed, — whom you have redeemed, 
not led into captivity. 

90. And this, which is true of the lower or household 
dominion, is equally true of the queenly dominion ; — that 
highest dignity is open to you, if you will also accept that 

30 highest duty. Rex et Regina — Roi et Reine — " Right- 
doers " ; they differ but from the Lady and Lord, in that 
their power is supreme over the mind as over the person — 
that they not only feed and clothe, but direct and teach. 
And whether consciously or not, you must be, in many a 

35 heart, enthroned : there is no putting by that crown ; queens 



II. OF queens' gardens. 101 

you must always be ; queens to your lovers ; queens to your 
husbands and your sons ; queens of higher mystery to the 
world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, 
before the myrtle crown, and the stainless sceptre of woman- 
hood. But, alas ! you are too often idle and careless queens 5 
grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate 
it in the greatest; and leaving misrule and violence to work 
their will among men, in dehance of the power which, hold- 
ing straight in gift from the Prince of all Peace, the wicked 
among you betray, and the good forget. 10 

91. "Prince of Peace." Note that name. When kings 
rule in that name, and nobles, and the judges of the earth, 
they also, in their narrow place, and mortal measure, receive 
the power of it. There are no other rulers than they : 
other rule than theirs is but ?>i("srule; they who govern \5 
verily " Dei gratia " are all princes, yes, or princesses, of 
Peace. There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injus- 
tice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you 
have provoked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, 
by their nature, are prone to fight; they will fight for any 20 
cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their cause for 
them, and to forbid them when there is no cause. There is 
no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the 
guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the sight of it, but 
you should not be able to bear it. Men may tread it down 25 
without sympathy in their own struggle ; but men are feeble 
in sympathy, and contracted in hope ; it is you only who 
can feel the depths of pain, and conceive the way of its 
healing. Instead of trying to do this, you turn away from 

it ; you shut yourselves within your park walls and garden 30 
gates ; and you are content to know that there is beyond 
them a whole world in wilderness — a world of secrets 
which you dare not penetrate, and of suffering which you 
dare not conceive. 

92. I tell you that this is to me quite the most amazing 35 



102 SESAME AND LILIES. 

among the phenomena of humanity. I am surprised at no 
depths to which, when once warped from its honor, that 
humanity can be degraded. I do not wonder at the miser's 
death, with his hands, as they relax, dropping gold. I do 

5 not wonder at the sensualist's life, with the shroud wrapped 
about his feet. I do not wonder at the single-handed mur- 
der of a single victim, done by the assassin in the darkness 
of the railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I do not 
even wonder at the myriad-handed murder of multitudes, 

10 done boastfully in the daylight, by the frenzy of nations, 
and the immeasurable, unimaginable guilt, heaped up from 
hell j}p heaven, of their priests, and kings. But this is won- 
derful to me — oh, how wonderful ! — to see the tender and 
delicate woman among you, with her child at her breast, and 

15 a power, if she would wield it, over it, and over its father, 
purer than the air of heaven, and stronger than the seas of 
earth — nay, a magnitude of blessing which her husband 
would not part with for all that earth itself, though it were 
made of one entire and perfect chrysolite : — to see her abdi- 

20cate this majesty to play at precedence with her next-door 
neighbor! This is wonderful — oh, wonderful! — to see her, 
with every innocent feeling fresh within her, go out in the 
morning into her garden to play with the fringes of its 
guarded flowers, and lift their heads when they are droop- 

25 ing, with her happy smile upon her face, and no cloud upon 
her brow, because there is a little wall around her place of 
peace ; and yet she knows, in her heart, if she would only 
look for its knowledge, that, outside of that little rose- 
covered wall, the wild grass, to the horizon, is torn up by 

30 the agony of men, and beat level by the drift of their life- 
blood. 

93. Have you ever considered what a deep under mean- 
ing there lies, or at least may be read, if we choose, in our 
custom of strewing flowers before those whom we think 

.S5 most happy ? Do you suppose it is merely to deceive them 



II. OF queens' gardens. 103 

into the hope that happiness is always to fall thus in 
showers at their feet ? — that wherever they pass they will 
tread on herbs of sweet scent, and that the rough ground 
will be made smooth for them by depth of roses ? So 
surely as they believe that, they will have, instead, to walk 5 
on bitter herbs and thorns ; and the only softness to their 
feet will be of snow. But it is not thus intended they 
should believe; there is a better meaning in that old cus- 
tom. The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with 
flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them. 10 
" Her feet have touched the meadows, and left the daisies 
rosy." 

94. You think that only a lover's fancy; — false and 
vain ! How if it could be true ? You think this also, per- 
haps, only a poet's fancy — 15 

"Even the light harebell raised its head 
Elastic from her airy tread." 

But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does not 
destroy where she passes. She should revive ; the hare- 
bells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think 1 20 
am rushing into wild hyperbole ? Pardon me, not a whit — 
I mean what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute 
truth. You have heard it said — (and I believe there is 
more than fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a 
fanciful one) — that flowers only flourish rightly in the 25 
garden of some one who loves them. I know you would 
like that to be true ; you would think it a pleasant magic if 
you could flush your flowers into brighter- bloom by a kind 
look upon them : nay, more, if your look had the power, 
not only to cheer, but to guard ; — if you could bid the 30 
black blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillar spare — 
if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, 
and say to the south wind, in frost — " Come, thou south, 



104 SESAME AND LILIES. 

and breathe upon my garden, that the spices of it may flow 
out." This you would think a great thing ? And do you 
think it not a greater tiling, that all this, (and how much 
more than this !) you can do, for fairer flowers than these — 

5 flowers that could bless you for having blessed them, and 
will love you for having loved them ; — flowers that have 
thoughts like yours, and lives like yours; and which, once 
saved, you save forever ? Is this only a little power ? 
Far among the moorlands and the rocks, — far in the dark- 

10 ness of the terrible streets, — these feeble florets are lying, 
with all their fresh leaves torn, and their stems broken — 
will you never go down to them, nor set them in order in 
their little fragrant beds, nor fence them, in their trem- 
bling, from the fierce wind ? Shall morning follow morn- 

15 ing, for you, but not for them ; and the dawn rise to watch, 
far away, those frantic Dances of Death * ; but no dawn 
rise to breathe upon these living banks of wild violet, and 
woodbine, and rose ; nor call to you, through your case- 
ment, — call (not giving you the name of the English poet's 

20 lady, but the name of Dante's great Matilda, who on the 
edge of happy Lethe, stood, wreathing flowers with flowers), 
saying, — 

" Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown, 

25 And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad 

And the musk of the roses blown " ? 

Will you not go down among them ? — among those 
sweet living things, whose new courage, sprung from the 
earth with the deep color of heaven upon it, is starting up 
30 in strength of goodly spire; and whose purity, washed 
from the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower of 
promise ; — and still they turn to you and for you, " The 
Larkspur listens — I hear, I hear ! And the Lily whispers 
— I wait." 

* See note, p. 57. 



II. OF queens' gardens. 105 

95. Did you notice that I missed two lines when I read 
you that iirst stanza ; and think that I had forgotten them ? 
Hear them now : — 

" Come into the garden, Maitd, 
For the black bat, night, lias flown. 5 

Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate, alone." 

Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate of this 
sweeter garden, alone, waiting for you ? Did you ever 
hear, not of a Maud, but a Madeleine, who went down to lo 
her garden in the dawn, and found One waiting at the 
gate, whom she supposed to be the gardener ? Have you 
not sought Him often ; sought Him in vain, all through the 
night ; sought Him in vain at the gate of that old garden 
where the fiery sword is set ? He is never there ; but at i5 
the gate of this garden He is waiting always — waiting to 
take your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of the 
valley, to see whether the vine has flourished, and the pome- 
granate budded. There you shall see with Him the little 
tendrils of the vines that His hand is guiding — there you 20 
shall see the pomegranate springing where His hand cast 
the sanguine seed ; — more : you shall see the troops of the 
angel keepers that, with their wings, wave away the hungry 
birds from the pathsides where He has sown, and call to 
each other between the vineyard rows, " Take us the foxes, 25 
the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines have 
tender grapes." Oh — you queens — you queens; among 
the hills and happy greenwood of this land of yours, 
shall the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have 
nests; and in your cities shall the stones cry out against 30 
you, that they are the only pillows where the Son of Man 
caa lay His head ? 



NOTES. 



KINGS' TREASURIES. 

This lecture was given at Rusholme Town Hall, near Manchester, 
December 6, 1864, in aid of a library fvuid for Rusholme Institute. It 
was first published, with "Queens' Gardens," in 1865. Mr. Ruskin 
spent much time helping to establish libraries and art galleries for the 
schools of England 

Page 21. 1. "Sesame," a grain used for food by Eastern nations. 
See motto, translated from Greek, " a cake of sesame." In the story 
of " Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" (Arabian Nights), the spoken 
words, "Open, Sesame !" magically undo the door to the robbers' 
treasure cave. The lecture explains another kind of treasure, and 
another kind of " Open, Sesame ! " 

Page 22. 1. 8. Mr. Ruskin's connections with various schools were 
as follows : 1858, Professor in School of Art, Cambridge ; 1867, Rede 
lecturer in Cambridge University ; 1869-1879 and 1883-1885, Slade 
Professor of Fine Art, Oxford University. In addition, he was con- 
stantly visiting schools, and talking or lecturing before them. 

1. 20. " Visitors' bell." In England the fine houses are provided with 
two bells, one for visitors, the other for callers on business. 

Page 23. 1.11. "Last infirmity." 

" Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 
(That last infirmity of noble mind) 
To scorn delights and live laborious days." 

— Milton, Lycidas, 70. 

Also, Tacitus, Historia, IV. 6, " Erant quibus adpetentior famae 
videretur quando etiaui sapientibus cupido gloriae novissima exuitur." 

1. 22. "Mortal." Lat. mors, mortis, death. 

1.35. "My Lord." Twenty-four bishops and two archbishops of 

107 



108 NOTES. 

the Established Church of England constitute the Lords Spiritual of 
the Upper House in Parliament. 'I'he archbiwhops are addressed as 
" My Lord Archbishop," and the bishops as " My Lord.'' 

— Whittaker''s Almanac (1899), p. 119. 

Page 24. 1. 21. Ruskin's writings on Political Economy are: (1862) 
" Unto this Last," four lectures; (1866) "Crown of Wild Olive " ; 
(1871-188-4) "Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Laborers 
of Great Britam" ; (1872) " Munera Pulveris," six essays. "Unto 
this Last " is the only one that was published before this passage was 
written. Mr. Ruskin's teaching in Political Economy is condensed 
by himself into "one great fact" m "Ad Valorem" ("Unto this 
Last"): "There is no Wealth but Life. Life, including all its 
powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest 
which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human 
beings ; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his 
own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both 
personal and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others." 

Page 25. 1. 34. " When we most need them." 

" Never the time and the place 
And the loved one all together ! " — Browning. 

Page 29. 1. 9. " Mixed with evil fragments." " In the building of 
a large book, there are always places where an indulged diffuseness 
weakens the fancy, and prolonged strain subdues the energy ; when 
we have time to say all we wish, we usually say more than enough ; 
and there are few subjects we can have the pride of exhausting, with- 
out wearying the reader." — Arrows of the Chace. 

Note. Queen of the Air, § 106. " Of course art-gift and amiability 
of disposition are two different things ; a good man is not necessarily 
a painter, nor does an eye for color necessarily imisly an honest mind. 
But great art implies the union of both powers : it is the expression, 
by an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is not there, we can have no 
art at all ; and if a soul, — and a right soul, too, — is not there, the art 
is bad, however dexterous." 

This thought is stated a little differently in the following [The 
Two Paths. Lecture at Manchester, 1859]: "I do not say in the 
least that in order to be a good painter you must be a good man ; but 
I do say that in order to be a good natural painter there must be strong 
elements of good in the mind, however warped by other parts of the 
character." 



NOTES. 109 

See also Queen of the Air, § 102. "Great art is the expression 
of the uiind of a great man, and mean art, that of the want of mind 
of a weak man. A foolish person builds foolishly, and a wise one, 
sensibly ; a virtuous one, beautifully, and a vicious one, basely. If 
stonework is well put together, it means that a thoughtful man planned 
it, and a careful man cut it, aiid an lionest man cemented it. If it has 
too much ornament, it means that its carver was too greedy of pleas- 
ure ; if too little, that he was rude, or insensitive, or stupid, and the 
like. So that when once you have learned how to spell these most 
precious of all legends, — pictures and buildings, — you may read the 
characters of men, and of nations, iji their art, as in a mirror ; nay, 
as in a microscope, and magnified a hundred fold ; for the character 
becomes passionate in the art, and intensifies itself in all its noblest 
or meanest delights. Nay, not only as in a microscope, but as under 
a scalpel, and in dissection ; for a man may hide himself from you, or 
misrepresent himself to you, every other way ; but he cannot in his 
work : there, be sure, you have him to the inmost. All that he likes, 
all that he sees, — all that he can do, — his imagination, his affections, 
his perseverance, his impatience, his clumsiness, cleverness, everything 
is there. If the work is a cobweb, you know it was made by a spider ; 
if honeycomb, by a bee ; a worm-cast is thrown up by a worm, and a 
nest wreathed by a bird ; and a house built by a man, worthily, if he 
is worthy, and ignobly if he is ignoble." 

Page 30. 1. 8. "Dead." 

"There studious let me sit. 
And hold high converse with the mighty Dead." 

— • Thompson" s Seasons: Winter, 1. 431. 

1. 9. " Elysian gates." According to classical mythology, Elysium 
was the abode after death of those whose good deeds on earth out- 
numbered their evil deeds. 

1. 11. " Faubourg St. Germain." A part of Paris where the nobility 
formerly resided, and where some of the old families still live. 

1. 13. " Make yourself noble." " The intellect becomes noble and 
ignoble according to the food we give it, and the kind of subjects 
with which it is conversant." — Stones of Venice. 

Also, " Studies have an influence and operation upon the manners 
of those that are conver-sant in them." — Bacon: note to essay on 
Studies, Anderson's edition. 

Page 31. 1. 13. " Cruel reticence. " " It is a strange habit of wise 



110 NOTES. 

humanity to speak in enigmas only, so that the highest truths and 
nsefullest laws must be hunted for through whole picture galleries of 
dreams, which to the vulgar seem dreams only. Thus Homer, the 
Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, 
have hidden all that is chiefly serviceable in their work, and in all the 
various literature they absorbed and reembodied, under types which 
have rendered it quite useless to the multitude." 

— Munera Piilveris, § 87. 

Also, " The meaning is withheld on purpose, and close locked, that 
you may not get it till you have forged the key of it in a furnace of 
your own heating.'''' — Queen of the Air, § 17. 

Also, " Remember that our right reading (of great literature) is 
icholly dependent on the materials we have in our own minds for an 
intelligent answering sympathy." — Queen of the Air, § 8. 

Pindar says, ' ' There is many an arrow in my quiver, full of speech 
to the loise, but, for the many, they need interpreters." 

Henry James in his story "The Figure in the Carpet," in the 
volume "Embarrassments," treats this "cruel reticence" of authors 
with delicate and tantalizing humor. 

Page 32. 1. 26. "Accuracy." Compare p. 90, Lilies, § 75. 

1.33. "Canaille." Lat. cams, dog. 

In French, literally, a pack of dogs. Long used in France by the 
nobility to designate the common people. 

Page 33. 1. 16. "False Latin quantity." At the time when Mr. 
Ruskin was writing this, thirty years and more ago, English youths of 
good family were rigidly drilled in Latin prosody, from the grammar 
school through the university. Ideals in education have changed 
greatly since that time, owing in part, undoubtedly, to Mr. Ruskin's 
vigorous protests. 

1. 34. " Chamfeleon." Gr. xaMa^, ground, X^wj/, lion, i.e. " a low or 
dwarf lion" (Century Dictionary), a fanciful name for the little 
reptile. 

Page 34. 1.17. " Taking the Form for the Power." "The second 
elementary cause of the loss of our nobly imaginative faculty is the 
worship of the Letter instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept 
as the ordinance and teaching of Deity ; and the apprehension of a 
healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book whose primal com- 
mands we refuse to obey. 

' ' No feather idol of Polynesia was ever a sign of more shameful 
idolatry than the modern notion in the minds of certainly the majority 
of English religious persons, that the Word of God, by which the 



KOTES. Ill 

heavens were of old, and the earth, . . . the Word of God, which 
came to the prophets, and comes still forever to all who will hear it ; 
and which, called Faithful and True, is to lead forth, in the judgment, 
the armies of heaven, —that this Word of God may yet be bound at 
our pleasure in morocco, and carried about iu a young lady's pocket, 
with tasselled ribands to mark the passages she most approves of." 

• — Aratra Pentelici : Idolatry, § 64. 

2 Corinthians, iii. 0. "For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 

Page 35. 1.25. "Ecclesia." This word originally meant any meet- 
ing of the people ; but since the existence of the Christian Church it 
has come to mean a meeting invested with the peculiar authority of 
religion. The struggle to maintain this authority has cost Europe many 
thousands of lives. Read, in the history of all European nations, the 
struggles of kingly power with ecclesiastical power. 

"Presbyter," in the same way, from meaning simply a person 
advanced in years, has come to mean a person possessed of religious 
authority. The word elder has suffered similar change, but has kept 
both first and second meanings. 

Page 36. 1. 9. "Max Miiller," a noted writer and lecturer on 
philology ; born in Germany, but for many years Professor of Modern 
Languages and Literature, and later of Philology, at Oxford. The 
lectures referred to are, " Lectures on the Science of Language." 

1. 27. " Lycidas." Milton's elegy (wi-itten 1637) on the death of his 
friend, Edward King, of Cambridge University. 

1.29. "The pilot." Matthew iv. 18-22. 

1. 30. " Two keys." Matthew xvi. 18-22. 

1. 35. " Climb into the fold." "So clomb this first great Thief into 
God's fold," i.e. Satan into the Garden of Eden. 

— Paradise Lost, IV. 192. 

Page 37. 1. 3. " Worthy bidden guest." Matthew xxii. 3, 8, 9. 

1.4. "Mouths." Gluttons. 

1.7. "Recks." CovapaxQ reckless. "Sped." Compare il!ferc/j«n« 
of Venice, Act. II. sc. ix. 1. 72. 

" So be gone ; you are sped." 

1.8. "List." Compare Z/s^Zess. " Lean and flashy songs. " "Ten- 
uis exsanguisque sermo," Cicero : De Oratoribus, I. xiii. 57. Also 
Bacon, essay on Studies: "Some books may be read by deputy, and 
extracts made from them by others ; but . . . distilled books are 
like common distilled waters, flashy things." 



112 NOTES. 

1.9. "Scrannel." Comparo scraiony. "Pipesof wretched straw." 
The shepherd in classic literature played on pipes, or flutes that he 
made from reeds. Milton calls them straw, as being of poor quality, 
not capable of sweet tones. 

1. 11. " Rank mist." False and corrupting doctrines. 

1. 13. "Grim wolf." John x. 12, 13. Also, Milton's Sonnet to 
Cromwell : — 

" Help us to .save free conscience from the paw 
Of hireling wolves." 

Masson's Life of 3TiUon (Vol. I. G38-040) says that there was much 
proselytizing at this time (1G37), "hundreds of Catholic priests go- 
ing about in England," "perverting" people to Catholicism. Arch- 
bishop Laud, while apparently disapproving of this in general, allowed 
it to go on. " Even moderate men saw in these 'perversions' a cause 
for general alarm. . . . Milton, in his Lycidas, written when public 
excitement was at its height, makes distinct reference to it." Pro- 
fessor Masson here quotes the couplet beginning, — 

"Besides what the grim wolf." 

1. 18. " Episcopal." The duties of a bi.sliop. Gr. ^ttictkottos, an over- 
seer. Lat. episcopus ; corruptly biscopus. A. 8. biscop. English, bishop. 

1. 20. " Miti-ed locks." A mitre was the head-dress of a bishop — 
a pointed cap. " No Bishop-lover." Milton was one of the leaders of 
Protestant thought in England in the seventeenth century. 

Page 38. 1. 34. "Ensamples." 1 Peter v. 3. Also, Chaucer, 
Canterbury Tales, — 

" This noble ensample to his sheep he yot. 
That first he wrought, and afterwards he taught." 

Page 39. 1.23. "Oversee." 1 Peter v. 1. 

Page 40. 1. 2. " Salisbury, the capital of AViltshire, in the southern 
part of England. The beautiful cathedral there (built 1220-1260) has 
a spire 406 feet high, said to be the highest spire in England. 

Note. — The 13th Letter in Time and Tide says, "A bishop's 
duty being to watch over the souls of his people, and give account 
of every one of them, it becomes practically necessary for him first 
to give some account of their bodies. . . . Over every hundred of 
the families composing a Christian State, there should be appointed an 
overseer, or bishop, to render account, to the State, of the life of every 



NOTES. 113 

individual in those families, and to have care both of their interest 
and conduct ... so that it may be impossible for any person, how- 
ever humble, to suffer from unknown want, or live in unrecognized 
crimes." 

1. 26. " Spirit, breath." Job xxvii. 3. " The spirit of God is in my 
nostrils." Marginal note, "i.e. the breath which God gave him."' 
As CoUingwood says, "a divine spirit, always indistinguishable, 
among simple folk, from the material breath in the nostrils of man." 
The Life and Work of John Buskin, Vol. II. p. 367. 

1. 29. " Wind bloweth, etc. John iii. 8. 

1. 30. "So is every one," etc. John iii. 8. 

Page 41. 1. 13. " Cretinous." From cretin, a Swiss name for a 
deformed and hopeless idiot. 

1. 29. Dante Alighieri. The great author of the Divine Comedy ; 
born in Italy, 1265, died 1321. He was one of Ruskin's literary 
masters. 

Dante's description of the keys, Purgatorio, Canto IX. 1. 117 (Pro- 
fessor Norton's trans.), " One was of gold and the other was of silver ; 
first with the white and then with the yellow " the sentinel angel un- 
locked the door. Professor Norton's note says, " The golden key is 
typical of power to open, and the silver of knowledge to whom to open." 

Of the steps the first was of white marble, the second " tinct with 
deeper hue than perse," i.e. dark blue, " of calcined and uneven stone, 
cracked all asunder, lengthwise and across ; the third and upper of red 
porphyry, red as blood that from a vein doth spirt." The tliresliold 
was a stone of diamond (Longfellow's trans.). (In Professor Norton's 
trans, adamant.) Professor Norton's note says that the first step sig- 
nifies Confession, the second Contrition, and the third Satisfaction, 
or Penance ; since Thomas Aquinas said the sacrament of Penance 
consisted of these three states of the mind. " The threshold of ad- 
amant may signify the authority of the church " (Norton). 

Maria Rosetti {The Shadow of Dante, p. 112) interprets the mean- 
ing of the steps as "candid confession, mirroring the whole man; 
mournful contrition, breaking the hard heart of the gazer on the Cross ; 
love, all aflame, offering up in satisfaction the life-blood of body, soul 
and spirit." 

Page 42. 1.3. " Taken away key of knowledge." Luke xi. 52. 

1. 6. " He that watereth." Proverbs xi. 25. 

1.13. "The rock-apostle." Matthew xvi. 18. 

1.14. " Take him." Matthew xxii. 13. 
Page 42, § 25. Cf. § 55. 



114 NOTES. 

Page 43. Note. — Raskin's writings are full of bitter com- 
ment on modern education. His own ideas of what true education and 
right living should be are formulated in the rules and creed of the 
Guild of St. George, a society founded by him in 1871, with the object 
avowed "to buy, or obtain by gift, land in England, and thereon to 
train into the healthiest and most refined life possible, as many Eng- 
lish men, P^nglish women, and English children as the land possessed 
can maintain in comfort." 

All boys were to learn to ride or sail, or to use tools. Girls were to 
learn to spin and weave, to care for houses and gardens. All children 
were to be taught, "in the history of five cities, — Athens, Rome, 
Venice, Florence, and London, — so far as they can understand, what 
has been beautifully and bravely done." Music was also to be taught, 
with the idea that its purpose is "to say a thing which you mean 
deeply, in the strongest and clearest possible way." 

The Creed. 

I. I trust in the Living God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven 
and earth, and of all things and creatures, visible and invisible. 

I trust in the kindness of His law, and the goodness of His work. 
And I will strive to love Him, and keep His law, and see His work, 
while I live. 

II. I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in the majesty of its 
faculties, the fulness of its mercy, and the joy of its love. 

And I will strive to love my neighbor as myself, and, even when I 
cannot, will act as if I did. 

III. I will labor, with such strength and opportunity as God gives 
me, for my own daily bread ; and all that my hand finds to do, I will 
do with my might. 

IV. I will not deceive, nor cause to be deceived, any human being 
for my gain or pleasure ; nor hurt, or cause to hurt, any human being 
for my gain or pleasure ; nor rob, or cause to be robbed, any human 
being for my gain or pleasure. 

V. I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy 
any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, 
and guard and perfect all natural beauty, upon the earth. 

VI. I will strive to raise my own body and soul daily into higher 
powers of duty and happiness ; not in rivalship or contention with 
others, but for the help, delight, and honor of others, and the joy and 
peace of my own life. 



NOTES. 115 

VII. I will obey all the laws of my country faithfully ; and the 
orders of its monarch, and of all persons appointed to be in authority 
under its monarch, so far as such laws or commands ai'e consistent 
with what I supiDose to be the laws of God ; and when they are not, 
or seem in any wise to need change, I will oppose them loyally 
and deliberately, not with malicious, concealed, or disorderly vio- 
lence. 

VIII. (Promise to obey the laws of the society of St. George.) 
See page 99, § 87, note. 

"The education which alone should be compulsory means . . . 
teaching children to be clean, active, honest, and useful." — Arrows 
of the Chace, Letter iv.. Education for Rich and Poor. 

Page 44. 1.4. "This writer." — Milton. See pp. 36, 37, in the text. 

1. 13. " Scene with the bishops," liichard III. Act III. sc. vii., in 
which the bishops are merely puppets in the hands of Richard. 

1. 14. "Cranmer. " English statesman and divine, made Archbishop 
of Canterbury by Henry VIII. He won the king's favor by annulling 
his mari'iage with Catherme of Aragon, in order that he might marry 
Anne Boleyn. Cranmer is a chai'acter in Shakespeare's Henry VIII. 

Mr. Ruskin's form of expression in the sentence is not happy, for 
"a scene" is not to be balanced against "a character." Professor 
Norton suggests that the meaning is: "Have you reflected on what 
Shakespeare's opinion of bishops was, as indicated by the two time- 
servers in Richard III.., and by his delineation of the weak, time- 
serving, but well-intentioned Cranmer ? " 

1. 15. "St. Francis" (1182-1226) and "St. Dominic" (1170-1221). 
Founders of orders of friars called after them, Franciscan and Do- 
minican. Dante in his Paradiso, XII. 88-96, places St. Francis in 
the highest heaven of heavens, and (XI. 118-20) says Dominic was a 
worthy colleague of Francis. 

1.16. "Virgil." The Roman poet (70-19 B.C.). Dante says Virgil 
was his guide through the Inferno. 

1. 16. "Him who made Virgil wonder." Inferno, XXIII. 125. 
This was Caiaphas the high priest (John xi. 49, 50; xviii. 13, 14). 
Dante represents him as being punished after death by being on the 
ground, "extended on a cross, so vilely, in eternal exile," with three 
stakes driven through his body. 

1.17. " Him whom Dante stood beside " {Inferno, XIX. 49-50) 
"like a friar who confesses the wicked assassin." This other wicked 
priest was Pope Nicholas III., punished, in the Inferno, for selling 
pardons during his papal incumbency, by being buried downward in 



116 NOTES. 

the earth with his feet in the air. This was the Italian method of pun- 
ishing hired assassins. These ]3assages show, more clearly than those 
from Shakespeare, a personal opinion, as Dante rewards the good 
priests and punishes the wicked ones, • — though he tells the story 
merely as a thing he saw in his vision of the Inferno, and was not re- 
sponsible for. 

1. 21. " The main struggle." The same alluded to in § 18. Queen 
Elizabeth and Pope Pius V. carried it on with spirit. 

1.24. "Ecclesiastical Courts." There are several such courts 
(Court of Arches, Court of Faculties, and others) in the Church of 
England, before which ecclesiastical causes are tried. See Hazell's 
Aimual for 1899, p. 208. 

In Irving's Annals of Our Time, p. 31, is found this entry : 
" Dec. 5, 1838. A woman performed penance at the door of Walton 
church, by order of the Ecclesiastical Court, for defaming the character 
of a neighbor." 

Page 45. 1. 6. "Break up your fallow ground." Jeremiah iv. 3. 

Note. See pp. 30-31. 

1.13. "Passion." Patior, pati, passns,vh. to suffer. It is so used 
in the phrase "The Passion of Christ." Ruskin uses the word to 
mean feeling. 

1.15. "Many outcries against sensation." In the sixties and 
seventies there was a good deal of criticism on the sensational writings 
of the period. Much of that writing would appear harmless enough 
now. 

1. 26. " Society of the Dead." 

" My days among the Dead are passed; 
Around me I behold, 
Where'er the casual eyes are cast. 

The mighty minds of old. 
My never-failing friends are they. 
With whom I converse day by day." 

— Southey. 

Page 47. 1.7. " River of Life." Revelation xxii. 1. 

1. 8. "The angels desire." 1 Peter i. 12. 

1. 18. This was written during the Civil War in America, but refers 
doubtless to England's policy toward Italy, Poland, and Denmark. 
Arrows of the Chace, Letter on the Foreign Policy of England, Oct. 
25, 1863. "I am wholly unable to go on with any of my proper work. 



NOTES. 117 

owing to the horror aud shame with which I regard the political posi- 
tion taken by, or rather, sunk into by, England in her foreign rela- 
tions, — especially in the affairs of Italy and Poland." (This letter was 
written in the year of the last great struggle of Poland against Russia. 
In 1860-1861 Italy struggled for freedom under Garibaldi's leader- 
ship.) 

Letter on Italian Question, Aug. 1, 1859 : — 

"To me the state of the modern political mind, which hangs the 
slaughter of twenty thousand men, and the destinies of twenty myriads 
of human souls, on the trick that transforms a ministry, or the chances 
of an enlarged or diminished interest in trade, is something so horrible 
that I find no utterance wherewith to characterize it." 

Letter on the Position of Denmark (in the Dano-Prussian War), 
July 7, 1864: — 

"Alas ! if protests were of any use, men with hearts and lips would 
have protested enough by this time." . . . " We saw the noble Cir- 
cassian nation murdered and never uttered word for them. We saw 
the noble Polish nation sent to pine in ice" (eighty thousand Poles 
were sent to Siberia in one year, 1832), " and never struck blow for 
them. Now the nation of our future Queen calls to us for help in its 
last agony, and we round sentences and turn our backs." The last 
sentence alludes to a debate in Parliament on this subject, in which 
Mr. Gladstone quoted Virgil at Mr. Disraeli. 

Also, Crown of Wild Olive, p. 83 (Lovell edition) : " I tell you broadly 
and boldly, that, within these last ten years, we English have, as a 
knightly nation, lost our spurs : we have fought where we should not 
have fought, for gain ; and we have been passive where we should not 
have been passive, for fear. I tell you that the principle of non-inter- 
vention, as now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as the worst 
frenzy of conquest, and differs from it only by being not only malig- 
nant, but dastardly." 

Page 48. 1. 7. " Effect on the price of cotton." The question of 
the supply of cotton for English manufactures was a serious one at 
this time. Much distress was caused among the Lancashire cotton 
operatives by the cessation of the supply of cotton from the Southern 
states during the war. — Annual Register, Vol. 104, p. 60. 

" Mr. Bazby remarked (in Parliament) that a continuation of the 
present distress for twelve months would result in a loss to the Ex- 
chequer of a hundred million pounds." — Annual Register, Vol. 104, 
p. 45. 

1. 10. "Stealing sLx walnuts." Mr. Ruskin was keenly alive to 



118 ISIOTES. 

everything that went on around him. For the specific cases referred 
to in this paragraph, see London newspapers for the year 1864. 

1. 16. " Selling opium at tlie cannon's mouth." England is respon- 
sible for the introduction of opium, from India, into China, in the 
early years of this century. 

' ' The Chinese P^mperor, either from a desire to put a stop to the con- 
sumption of opium in his dominions, or because he wished to encourage 
the home production of the drug, prohibited its importation. As the 
English in India were largely engaged in the production of opium for 
the Chinese market, — the people of the country smoking it instead of 
tobacco, — the British government insisted that the Emperor should 
not interfere with so lucrative a trade. War ensued (1839). The 
Chinese, unable to contend against English gunboats, were soon forced 
to withdraw their prohibition of the foreign opium traffic ; and the 
English government, with the planters of India, reaped a golden har- 
vest of many millions for their violation of the rights of a heathen 
and half-civilized people." — The Leading Facts of English History, 
Montgomery, p. 369, § 638. See also Justin McCarthy : History of 
Our Own Times, Chap. VIII. 

1. 32. " Perplex' d i' the extreme." Othello, Act V. sc. ii. "Not 
easily jealous, but being wrought, perplex'd i' the extreme." 

Page 49. 1. 3. "Bayoneting young girls." Refers probably to 
massacres in Syria, 1860-1861. "In order to carry out the reforms 
promised, there must be a steady, friendly, but sufficient pressure upon 
the Turkish government." — ^4/i«?(rti Register, Vol. 103, p. 124. 

1. 7. "Root of all evil." 1 Timothy vi. 10. "The first of these 
forms of Idolatry is the worship of the Eidolon, or Phantasm, of Wealth 
. . . which is briefly to be defined as the servile apprehension of an 
active power in Money, and the submission to it as the God of our 
life." — Aratra Pentelici, § 63. 

1.24. "Good Samaritan." Luke x. 25-37. 

Page 50. 1. 10. "Scorpion whips." 1 Kings xii. 11. Also, Von 
Ranke, Universal History (trans.), p. 57. "If the people resisted 
(Rehoboam) they should be punished, not with whips but with scor- 
pions ; that is, rods of knotted wood furnished with barbs, producing 
a wound like the bite of a scorpion." 

Also, Munera Pulveris, §130. "The true scorpion whips are 
those of the nation's pleasant vices, which are to it as St. John's lo- 
custs, crown on the head, ravin in the mouth, and sting in the tail." 
See also Revelation ix. 3-10. 

Page 51. 1. 1. " Pinched their stomachs." " When Southey, in 



NOTES. 119 

1805, went to see Walter Scott, it occurred to him in Edinburgh 
that, having had neither new coat nor liat since little Edith was born, 
he must surely be in want of both ; and here, in the metropolis of the 
North, was an opportunity of arraying himself to his desire. ' How- 
beit,' he says, ' on considering the really respectable appearance which 
my old ones made, for a traveller, — and considering, moreover, that 
as learning was better than house or land, it certainly must be much 
better than fine clothes, — I laid out all my money in books, and came 
home to wear out my old clothes in the winter.' Southey's library 
of fourteen thousand volumes was, he says, ' more than metaphori- 
cally meat, drink, and clothes for me and mine. I verily believe,' 
he goes on to say, ' that no one in my station was ever so ricli before, 
and I am very sure that no one in any station had ever a more thorough 
enjoyment of riches in any kind or in any way.' " — English Men 
of Letters, Southey, p. 101. 

1. 19. "Bread, sweet as honey." The first motto for ^i?i(7s' Treas- 
uries was Job xxviii. 5, 6. 

Page 52. 1. 5. " Observatory." One chief use of the National 
Observatory at Greenwich is to furnish absolutely correct or astro- 
nomical time for the masters of ships to determine their course 

by- 

1. 8. " British Museum," founded in 1753 by Act of Parliament. 

1. 24. " Solenhofen." For the strange new species, half bird, half 
fish, discovered there, see Century Dictionary or Webster under Ar- 
chceopteryx. 

1. 33. "Professor Owen." Sir Richard Owen, born, 1804, Lancaster, 
died, 1892, London. In 1856, Superintendent of Natural History De- 
partment, British Museum. 

Page 53. 1. 29. "The shop." To Mr. Ruskin's mind, a purely 
mercantile civilization contained the germs of all that is degrading to 
national life. 

Note. The discussion of these rival policies was truly hot all 
through the early years of Victoria's reign. The chief bone of conten- 
tion was the Corn Laws. See note to p. 68, 1. 32. 

"Competition." "Government and cooperation are in all things 
the laws of life ; anarchy and competition the laws of death." 
— -Modern Painters, v. Also, "The false, unnatural, and destruc- 
tive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at 
half price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his 
competition to work for an inadequate sum." — Unto this Last: 
The Boots of Honor, p. 56 (Lovell edition). 



120 NOTES. 

At the end of A Joy Forever. Mr. Rnskin qnotes a couplet from 
Clough's satirical poem, Tli^^ Latent Becalof/ne : — 

" Thou shalt not covet, — but tradition 
Approves all forms of competition." 

Page 54. 1. 2. " Ludgate." A trading district of London, near 
which formerly stood one of the city gates (Ludgate). Scott's Fo7-- 
tunes of Nigel, Chap. I., relates how in the time of James I., Allan 
Ramsay's shop was kept by "two stout-bodied and strong- voiced 
apprentices, who kept up the cry of ' What d'ye lack ? What d'ye 
lack ? ' accompanied by the appropriate recommendations of the 
articles in which they dealt," and making personal application to 
" every passer-by." 

1. 17. "Austrian guns." 1847-1859, the Italian war for freedom 
from Austrian rule. Venice suffei-ed a long siege and finally capitu- 
lated to Austria. 

In the lecture on War (Croton of Wild Olive), Mr. Iluskin, 
speaking of Tintoret's paintings in Venice, says: "Three of the 
noblest were there in the form of shreds of ragged canvas, mixed up 
with the laths of the roof rent through by three Austrian shells. It 
is not every lectm-er who could tell you that he had seen three of his 
favorite pictures torn to rags by bomb-shells. And after such a sight, 
it is not every lecturer who would tell you that, nevertheless, war was 
tlie foundation of all great art. 

" We talk of peace and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of 
peace and civilization ; but I found that those were not the words 
which the Muse of History couples together : that on her lips, the 
words were — peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and 
corruption, peace and death. I found, in brief, tliat all great nations 
learned their truth of word, and strength of thouglit, in war. . . . 

" Yet now note carefully, in the second place, it is not all war of 
which this can be said. ... It is not the ravage of a barbarian wolf- 
flock . . . ; nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of mountaineers 
. . . ; nor the occasional struggle of a strong peaceful nation for its 
life . . . ; nor the contest of merely ambitious nations for the extent 
of power. . . . None of these forms of war build anything but 
tombs. But the creative or foundational war is that in which the 
natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by 
consent, into modes of beautiful — though it may be fatal — play : in 
which the natural ambition and love of power of men are disciplined 
into the aggressive conquest of surrounding evil : and in which the 



NOTES. 121 

natural instincts of self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness of the 
institutions, and purity of the households, which they are appointed 
to defend. To such war as this all men are born ; in such war as this 
any man may happily die ; and forth from such war as this have arisen, 
throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and vir- 
tues of humanity." 

1. 20. " Sandbags " were used for repairing breaches in the fort walls. 

1. 23. "National love of Art." See Arrows of the Chare, of the 
hanging of the Turner drawings : "The space will be difficult to obtain, 
for while the British public of the upper classes are always ready to pay 
any money whatever to please their pride in their own dining-rooms 
and ballrooms, they would not, most of them, give five shillings a 
year to get a good room in the National Gallery to show the national 
drawings in." 

1.20. "Stables of the cathedrals." The French Revolution of 
1789 wrecked many of the noblest cathedrals in France. The Abbey 
of St. Denis was turned into a market with stalls, and the still greater 
Abbey-church of Cluny has served for a stable for breeding horses for 
the French government for many years. 

§ 35. " When Ruskin complains that the delightful silence which 
reigned in some rural districts is now disturbed by the life of industry, 
and that portions of Switzerland which he and other kindred spirits 
could once enjoy in comparative seclusion are now vulgarized by 
numbers of uneducated tourists, when he complains of the very facil- 
ity of approach to many of these haunts brought about by the rail- 
ways, and the picnics which do not agree with the exquisite musings 
of the solitary votary of nature, we cannot help feeling that this 
arises not only from a romantic, but from an essentially un.social 
spirit. There can be no doubt that our enjoyment nuist be impaired 
by the reduction to a commonplace of what stimulates our highest 
emotions ; but we must willingly make this sacrifice when we consider 
the great gain accruing to hundreds or thousands, where before it 
reached units." — Waldstein, The Work of John Ritskin, p. 152. 

Ruskin himself says (Oxford lecturer): "The end of my whole 
professorship would be accomplished, if only the Engli.sh nation could 
be made to understand that the beauty which is to be a joy forever 
must be a joy for all." 

CoUingwood says (Vol. II., p. 450): " Mr. Ruskin's dislike of rail- 
ways has been the text of a great deal of misrepresentation. Asa 
matter of fact, he never objected to main lines of railway comnui- 
nication ; but he strongly objected, in common with a vast number 



122 NOTES. 

of people, to the introduction of railways into the districts whose 
chief interest is in their scenery: especially where, as in the English 
Lake district, the scenery is in miniature, easily spoiled by embank- 
ments and viaducts, and by the rows of ugly buildings which usually 
grow up round a station ; and where the beauty of the landscape can 
only be felt in quiet walks or drives through it." 

Page 55. 1. 1. " Schaffhausen." It was here that Ruskin saw 
the sight described in Praiterita, Chap. VI., p. 97 (illustrated Cabinet 
edition). "At which ojjen country of low undulation, far into blue, 
gazing, — suddenly — behold — beyond. There was no thought in any 
of us for a moment of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, 
sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by the 
sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought or 
dreamed, — the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more 
beautiful to us ; not more awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred 
Death." 

1.2. "Tell's chapel." A little chapel built by the Swiss as a 
monument to their legendary hero, William Tell. 

1. 3. Clarens. At the extreme eastern shore of Lake Geneva, near 
the Castle of Chillon. 

1. 2L "Firing." When a traveller has made the ascent of Mt. 
Blanc, the news of his arrival at the summit is signalled to Chamouni 
in the valley below, and a cannon is fired to celebrate the event. 

1. 24. "Towers of the vineyards." "Built in biblical times for the 
watchmen, on the heights and along the side hill, so that the watch- 
men could see from one to the other and give signals of the approach 
of any danger, as of an enemy or of animals destructive of the crops." 
— Smith's Bible Victionnry, p. 313. 

1. 32. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, to which Mr. Ruskin wrote 
many letters on subjects of public interest. 

Page 56. Note. This is one of the many suggestions made by 
Mr. Ruskin which are now bearing fruit in public works in America. 
" The Consumers' League," in the work of which Dr. John Graham 
Brooks, of Boston, is a leader, exists to prevent the buying of articles 
made in sweat shops or under other conditions hurtful to the laborers. 

In Time and Tide, Letter on Pressure of Excessive and Improper 
Work: " Hardly a week passes without some such misery coming to 
my knowledge, and the quantity of pain, and anxiety of daily effort, 
ending all at last in utter grief, which the lower middle classes in 
England are now suffering, is so great that I feel constantly as if I 
were living in one great churchyard with people all around me cling- 



NOTES. 123 

ing feebly to the edges of open graves, and calling for help as they fall 
back into them, out of sight." 

Page 57. 1.19. "Stones." Matthew vii. 9. The relieving officer 
had in mind the well-known penalty for pauperism and vagrancy, 
— hard labor at breaking stones for the roads. 

Note. The point to the passage is in the fact that Englishmen 
were present. 

" Cancan d'enfer." See p. 104, 1. 16. 

Page 59. 1. 1. "The poor like to die independently." Compare 
the pathetic character of old Betty Higden in Dickens's Our Mutual 
Friend, Book III. Chap. 8. 

Note. Isaiah Iviii. 1-6. Abridged and slightly changed. 

Page 60. 1. 9. Satanella, by Balfe, 1858 ; Bobert le Diable, 
by Meyerbeer, 1831 ; Fatist, by Verdi, 1859 ; three operas in which 
the devil is an important character. 

1. 11. " Dio," Italian word for God. Jubilate Deo, Cantate Deo, 
responses sung in the Roman Catholic and Protestant Episcopal services. 

1.27. "Lazarus." Luke xvi. 20. 

Page 61. 1. 26. "Amusements." See Time and Tide, Letters 
v., and VI., visits to the pantomime and the jugglers. " Presently after 
this came on the forty thieves, who, as I told you, were girls; and, 
there being no thieving to be presently done, and time hanging heavy 
on their hands, the forty thief-girls proceeded to light forty cigars. 
Whereupon the British public gave them a round of applause. Where- 
upon I fell a-thinking ; and saw little more of the piece, except as an 
ugly and disturbing dream." 

Page 62. 1.18. "Chalmers," Thomas. The most eminent Scottish 
divine of the past century, 1780-1847. 

1. 34. " The last of our great painters. ' ' J. M. W. Turner, in defence 
of whose work Ruskin wrote the first volumes of Modern Painters. 
"Neglected." The Turner drawings were allowed to lie for years 
uncared for in the basement of the National Gallery, until Mr. Rus- 
kin himself arranged them and in 1858 framed them and had them 
hung in an accessible room there. "But," he writes (^Arrows of 
the Chace), "the public never stops a moment in the room where 
they hang ; and the damp, filth, and gas have soiled their frames and 
warped the drawings, 'by friend remembered not.' " 

Page 63. 1. 1. "Folded." 

"Folding like an airy vest. 
The very clouds had sunk to rest." 

— Early poem on Snowdon (1831). 



124 NOTES. 

1. 20. " Hades." "And none of those who dwell there desire to 
depart thence, such sweet songs doth death know how to sing to 
them." — Trans, from Plato: Cratylus. 

1. 28. "Advance in life." See p. 23, § 3. 

1. 30. " Scythian. " A term covering in ancient times the inhabitants 
of all the country northeast of Europe and Asia. The account in 
Herodotus (Melpomene, 73) of the Scythians, with their wild, prim- 
itive life and manners, fascinated Ruskin's imagination. His poem. 
The Scythian Guest, describes the custom mentioned here. See also 
his poems The Scythian Grave and Scythian Banquet Song. 

Page 64. 1.6. "Caina." /n/er«"o, XXXII. 58. " Livid were the 
woeful shades within the ice, setting their teeth to the note of the 
stork," i.e. chattering. The first four divisions of the ninth circle 
of Dante's Hell, where traitors were punished. Name is taken from 
Cain, Genesis iv. 1. 

Note. Romans viii. 6, " To be spiritually minded is life and 
peace." 

1.34. "Visible," etc. Quoted from Munera Fiilveris, § 122, iii., 
the essay called " Government." 

Page 65. § 43. " From Scott and Homer, my own chosen masters, 
I learned a most sincere love of kings, and dislike of everybody who 
attempted to disobey them. Only, both by Homer and Scott, I was 
taught strange ideas about kings, which I find for the present much 
obsolete ; for, I perceived that both the author of the ' Iliad ' and the 
author of ' Waverley ' made their kings or king-loving persons do 
harder work than anybody else. Tydides or Idomeneus always killed 
twenty Trojans to other people's one, and Redgauntlet speared more 
salmon than any of the Solway fishermen, and — what was particu- 
larly a subject of admiration to me — I observed that they not only 
did more, but in proportion to their doings, got le.ss than other people 
— nay, that the best of them were even ready to govern for nothing ! 
and let their followers divide any quantity of spoil or profit." — Proe- 
terita, Vol. I., p. 14. 

1. 9. "People-eating." Gr. Srifio^6pos, Iliad A, 238. 

1.22. " II gran rifiuto." Dante, /«/crno. III. " I .saw the one who 
had made the great refusal.''^ Longfellow thinks this was Pope Celes- 
tinus V. who abdicated the papacy five months after his election. 
Dante's idea was that popes were ordained by heaven, therefore abdi- 
cation was a sin. 

1. 25. "All power, properly so-called, is wise and benevolent. 
There is no true potency, remember, but that of help ; nor true 



NOTES. 125 

ambition, but ambition to save." — Croion of Wild Olive, War, p. 82 
(Lovell). 

1.28. " Cantel." Con\^^.ve canteloupe. ^eQ Centw^y Dictionary. 

1. 34. " King of men." A title very often given to Agamemnon in 
the Iliad. 

1. 31. " ' Go,' and he goeth." Matthew viii. 9. 

Page 66. 1. 5. •' ' Do and teach.' " Matthew v. 19. 

1. 9. " Moth and rust." Matthew vi. 19. 

1.12. "Robber-kings." The Forty Thieves again. 

1. 21. "Jewel could not equal." Job xxviii. 12-28. 

1, 23. " Athena." Greek goddess of Wisdom. The shuttle is the 
emblem of Neith, Egyptian goddess of Wisdom. Note the mingling 
of Hebrew, Egyptian, and Greek religious thoughts, and the inter- 
pretation of one by the other. 

1. 23. " Vulcanian." Compare volcanic. Vulcan was god of handi- 
craft, — fire and the working of metals. He forged Achilles's armor, 
Iliad, Books XVIII., XIX. 

1. 25. Delphi was the chief seat of the ancient worship of Apollo, 
god of the sun, and of light in general. 

1.26. "Tissue." The "web" above. " Potable gold." Drink- 
able. Milton's Paradise Lout, III. 608, "Rivers run potable gold." 

1. 27. "Angels of Conduct, Toll, and Thought." "Athena rules over 
moral passion and practically useful art. She does not make men 
learned, but prudent, and subtle" (Ulysses, in the Odyssey, is "the 
man of many wiles ") : " she does not teach them to make their work 
beautiful, but to make it right." — Queen of the Air, VI. § 101. 

" Vulcan or Hephtiestus, lord of all labor in which is the Hush and 
the sweat of the brow," lord of earthly fire ; " Apollo, the spirit of all 
kindling, purifying, and illuminating intellectual wisdom," lord of 
heavenly fire. — Queen of the Air, § 13. 

1.29. "Winged." Ruskin always attaches a spiritual meaning to 
wings, — the buoyant, hopeful, and helpful divine power. 

1. 30. " Path," etc. Job xxviii. 7. 

Page 67. 1. 4. "National rifle grounds," at Wimbledon. 1860- 
1890. Established by Lord Elcho, as a means of giving military train- 
ing to the large ai'niy of England's volunteers, or "militia." "The 
queen herself fired the first shot (a bull's eye) and thus inaugurated 
those great national meetings, where many thousands compete annu- 
ally for prizes amoimting in value to thousands of pounds." — Ency- 
clopcedia Britannica, V. 24, p. 294. 

Enjiland's Volunteer Association for national defence was chartered 



126 I?OTES. 

by Henry VIII. in 1537, as the " Fraternity or Guylde of Saint George, 
Maisters and Rulars of the Science of Artillery, for long bowes, cros- 
bowes and Hand-Gonnes." — Ibid. 

It is probable that Mr. Ruskin's Guild of St. George took its name 
from this organization. He certainly wished to make it an " army of 
thinkers," instead of an " army of stabbers." 

1. 12. " The only book." Unto this Last, IV. Ad Valorem. 

1. 25. "Ten millions of consternation." The meaning is that it costs 
those nations that amount to maintain their navies ; indeed it cost 
England much more. M. Mocquard, in answer to four Liverpool 
merchants who asked him if Napoleon would invade England (1859), 
wrote, " Great nations are made to esteem, not to fear each other." 
■ — Irving's Annals of our Time, p. 561. 

May 1, 1860, Lord Lyndhurst in Parliament compared English war 
equipment with that of France, and urged the necessity of strengthen- 
ing the navy. " He said that it was with extreme pain that he was 
instrumental in asking for such large sums of money, but it was the 
wish of the nation that the navy should be maintained in sufficient 
force ; and he referred to the suggestion of Mr. Cobham, that where 
the French had two ships, we should have three." — Annual Begister, 
V. 102 (Hist.), p. 131. 

Page 68. 1.7. "To be at peace." " And as the work of war and 
sin has always been the devastation of this blossoming earth, whether 
by spoil or idleness, so the work of peace and virtue that of the first day 
of Paradise, to 'dress it and to keep it.' " — Time and Tide, Letter 24. 

1. 32. "Corn Laws." A series of laws regulating the home and 
foreign grain trade of England. In 1849 the heavy duty on imported 
grain was greatly reduced and the price of flour and bread conse- 
quently lowered. "The lower classes agitated for the repeal of the 
Corn Laws, thinking they would be better off if bread was cheaper ; 
never perceiving that as soon as bread was permanently cheaper, wages 
would permanently fall in precisely that proportion. The Corn Laws 
were rightly repealed ; not, however, because they directly oppressed 
the poor, but because they indirectly oppressed them, in causing a 
large quantity of their labor to be consumed unproductively." — Unto 
this Last, III. Qui Judicatis Terrain, p. 57 (Lovell edition). 

Page 69. Note. Mr. Ruskin here treats the economic theories of 
his day to a dose of his most pungent satire. 

Page 70. "Morality is visually acknowledged to be the highest 
aim of humanity, and therefore of education." — Herbart, Science of 
Education. 



NOTES. 127 

Also, "The great object is not merely knoioledge, but character.''^ 
^ Henry Acland, Bill introducing Educational Budget, 1859. 

Also, "And by this you may recognize true education from false. 
False education is a delightful thing, and warms you, and makes you 
every day think more of yourself ; and true education is a deadly cold 
thing, with a Gorgon's head on her shield, and makes you every day 
think worse of yourself." — Time and Tide : Hyssop, Letter 25. 

SUMMARY OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 

"The first lecture says, or tries to say, that life being very short, 
and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in 
reading valueless books ; and that valuable books should, in a civilized 
country, be within the reach of every one, printed in excellent form, 
for a just price. . . . For we none of us need many books. . . . 
And I would urge upon every young man, as the beginning of his 
due and wise provision for his household, to obtain as soon as he 
can, by the severest economy, a restricted, serviceable, and steadily 

— however slowly — increasing series of books for use through life." 

— Preface to Sesame and Lilies, edition of 1871. 

LILIES. 

This lecture was given December 14, 1864, at the Town Hall, Man- 
chester, in aid of a fund for opening and fitting up additional schools 
in a densely inhabited part of St. Andrews, Ancoats. Wise and Smart, 
Bibliography, Vol. II. p. 144. 

Page 72. " Septuagint." Read Isaiah xxxv. 1. 

1. 20. "Likeness of a kingly crown." Milton, Paradise Lost, II. 
GG5. 

Page 73. § 52. The kernel of the whole matter. 

Page 73. § 5.S. The kernel of this lecture. 

Page 74. 1. 29. " Repeat." See p. 42, § 25. 

Page 75. § 56. With the exception c^ Julia' ( Two Gentlemen of 
Verona), these names and their place in Shakespeare are in the back 
part of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. 

Page 76. 1. 14. " Coxcomb," etc., Othello, V. 2. See Lear, L 4, 
for another use of the word. 

1. 26. "A woman," Isabella. 

Page 77. 1. 1. "Unlessoned girl." Merchant of Venice, IIL 2. 
Portia, of herself. 

1. 6. "Accuracy." Seep. 91, § 75. 



128 NOTES. 

Page 77. 1. 29. " Scott's romantic poetry." The Lady of the 
Lake, Marmion, Lay of the Last 3Iinstrel, etc. 

Page 78. Names, see Webster. 

Page 79. 1.4. " Dead lady." (See note, p. 41, 1. 29.) Beatrice. In 
real life she was Beatrice Portinari, a lady of Florence, whom Dante 
loved, in a poetical fashion, from the time he was nine years old. 
Rossetti calls it "that Paradisal love of his." {Vita Niiova.) She 
died when she was twenty-four and Dante twenty-five. 

" O'er Dante's heart in youth had tolled 
The knell that gave his lady peace." 

— Rossetti, Dante at Verona. 

1.19. "Dante (Gabriel) Rossetti." (1828-1882.) (Seeabove.) An 
English painter and poet and a personal friend of Mr. Raskin. The 
poem quoted is called Canzone: Of His Change through Love, 
written by Parmuccio del Bagna, the "knight of Pisa." See Vol. 
II., p. ^96, Rossetti's collected works. Rossetti was one of the 
group of painters who called themselves Pre-Raphaelites, because 
their theories of their ait resembled those of the painters who 
lived before the time of Raphael, the great Florentine. They tried 
to paint things as they saw them, without reference to conventional 
rules of drawing or composition. Collingwood says they were 
characterized by "sincerity of imagination." In Fiction, Fair and 
Foul, Ruskin says that Pre-Raphaelitism is "the best thing Italy 
has done through England." He wrote one long essay and several 
shorter ones in defence of the movement. 

Page 80. § 61. For names, see dictionary. 

1. .'JO. "Alcestis." Read Browning's poem, Balaustion's Adven- 
ture, which tells the story of the play. 

Page 81. 1.7. "Lawgiver." Moses, Exodus ii. 5-10. 

1. 9. "Egyptian Spirit of Wisdom," the goddess Neith. 

1.13. "Olive," Peace. "Helm," War. " Cloudy shield." "A 
spirit of wisdom, perfect in gentleness, irresistible in anger ; having 
also physical dominion over the air, which is the life and breath of 
all creatures, and clothed, to human eyes, with a;gis of fiery cloud, 
and raiment of falling dew." — Aratra Pentelici, Imagination, §07. 
Ruskin developed this idea in Queen of the Air. 

Page 82. 1.31. "Command." 

"A perfect woman nobly planned, 
To warn, to comfort, and command." 

— Wordsworth, She teas a Phantom, etc. 



NOTES. 129 

Also, " You fancy, perhaps, as you have been told so often, that 
a wife's rule should only be over her husband's house, not over his 
mind. Oh, no ! the true rule is just the reverse of that ; a true wife 
in her husband's house, is his servant ; it is in Ms heart that she is 
queen. Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is her part to be ; 
whatever of the highest he can hope, it is hers to promise ; all that is 
dark in him she must purge into purity ; all that is failing in him she 
must strengthen into truth : from her, through all the world's clamor 
he must win his praise ; in her, through all the world's warfare, he must 
find his peace." — Crown of Wild Olive., War, jj. 93 (Lovell edition). 

Page 83, § 65. Patmore's poem quoted is The Angel in the House. 
See The Betrothal, Part VII., The Queen. 

Page 84. 1. 33. "The place of Peace." Ruskin says of his own 
home, " I had never heard my father's or mother's voice raised in 
any question with each other, nor seen an angry, or even slightly 
hurt or offended glance in the eye of either. I had never heard a 
servant scolded ; nor even suddenly, passionately, or in any severe 
manner blamed. I had never seen a moment's trouble or disorder 
in any household matter ; nor anything whatever, either done in a 
hurry, or undone (not done) in due time." — Prceterita, Chap. II., 
p. 38. 

Page 85. 1.7. " Household Gods. " The Lares et Penates, whose 
temples were the homes of the Romans. 

1. 32. " La donna h mobile qual pium' al vento." From a song in 
Verdi's opera Bigoletto, trans. " Woman is changeable as a feather 
in the wind." 

1. 33. " Variable," etc. From Scott's Marmioti, Canto VI. stanza 30. 

Page 86. 1.20. "That poet," i.e. William Wordsworth. Ruskin 
says {Fiction, Fair and Foul) that by him English literature is 
"enriched with a new and singular virtue in the aerial purity and 
healthful rightness of his quiet song." "A gracious and constant 
mind ; as the herbage of its native hills, fragrant and jjure." 

Page 87. 1. 31. "A countenance," etc. From She toas a Phan- 
tom of Delight. 

Page 88. 1. 28. "Valley of Humiliation." "For it is an hard 
matter for a man to go down into the Valley of Humiliation . . . and 
to catch no slip by the way." — Pilgrim's Progress. 

Page 89. 1. 26. "For all who are desolate," etc. "That it may 
please Thee to defend and provide for the fatherless children, widows, 
and all who are desolate and oppressed." — English Book of Common 
Prayer: Litany. 



130 NOTES. 

Page 90. 1.10. "His judgment-throne." Romans xiv. 10 ; Mat- 
thew xix. 28 ; Psalms ix. 7 ; Isaiah vi. 1, and others. 

1. 11. "Spirit of the Comforter." John xiv. 26. The Mystery of 
Life and its Arts, a lecture sometimes included in Sesame and Lilies 
has this passage : " You may see continually girls who have never been 
taught to do a single useful thing thoroughly ; who cannot sew, who 
cannot cook, who cannot cast an account, nor prepare a medicine, 
whose whole life has been passed either in play or in pride ; you will 
find girls like these, when they are earnest-hearted, cast all their innate 
passion of religious spirit, which was meant by God to support them 
through the irksomeness of daily toil, into grievous and vain medita- 
tion over the meaning of the great Book, of which no syllable was 
ever yet to be understood but thro' a deed ; all the instinctive wisdom 
and mercy of their womanhood made vain, and the glory of their 
pure consciences warped into fruitless agony concerning questions 
which the laws of common serviceable life would either have solved 
for them in an instant or kept out of their way. Give such a girl any 
true work that will make her active in the dawn and weary at night, 
with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the 
better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will 
transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace." 

§ 75. Note how Ruskin insists on accuracy. 

Page 93. 1. 5. Couplet quoted from She was a Phantom, etc., 
see p. 87, § 71, note. 

Page 94. 1.24. " Christ Church" College, Oxford University (Mr. 
Ruskin's college). "Trinity" College, Cambridge, the second great 
English university. 

Page 96. 1.16. " Sharp arrows." Psalms cxx. 4. 

§ 84. For geograijhical names, see dictionary. 

1. 32. "Muses." The divinities of poetry, the arts, and the sciences. 
Sacrifices of water, milk, and honey were offered to them on Mt. Par- 
nassus. 

1. 33. " Minerva." Latin name for Athena. 

Page 97. 1. 18. "Sheep having no shepherd." Matthew ix. 36. 

1. 20. "Pleasant places desolate." Zechariah vii. 14 ; Amos vii. 9. 

Mr. Ruskin said at the end of one of his Oxford lectures, " I tell 
you that neither sound policy nor religion can exist in England until, 
neglecting, if it must be, your own pleasure gardens and pleasure 
chambers, you resolve that the streets, which are the habitation of the 
poor, and the fields, which are the playgrounds of their children, shall 
be again restored to the spirits that ordain and reward all that is 



NOTES. 131 

decent and orderly, beautiful and pure." — E. T. Cook, Studies in 
Buskin. 

1. 28. "Pollution." Irving's Annals of Our Time, p. 524, relates 
that (July, 1868) the condition of the Thames was such that the Par- 
liamentary Committees could not meet in rooms overlooking the 
river. It was necessary in this year to vote three million pounds for 
cleansing the Thames. 

1. 34. " An Unknown God." Acts xvii. 23. 

Page 99. 1. 12. "Power of the royal hand." "The custom of 
touching to heal was inaugurated by Edward the Confessor, 1508. In 
Charles II. 's reign 92,107 persons were touched, and according to 
Wiseman, the king's physician, they were nearly all cured ! The 
custom was dropped by George I. 1714." — Harper's Book of Facts, 
King's Evil. 

Page 100. 1. .30. "Rex, regina" (Latin), roi, reine (French), 
and right, are all from the same root. 

Page 101. 1. 9. " Prince of Peace." Isaiah iv. 6. 

1.16. "Dei gratia." " By the grace of God. " Victoria Dei gratict 
regina Britannim, inscribed on English coins. 

Page 102. 1.19. "Chrysolite." Othello, Y. 2. 

" If heaven had made me such another world 
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, 
I'd not have sold her for it." 

Page 103. 1. 11. "Her feet have," etc. Tennyson's Maud, 
XII. 6. 

1. 16. "Even the light," etc. The Lady of the Lake, Canto I. 
stanza 18. " The most beautiful poem that Scotland ever sang by the 
stream sides." — Pr(eterita, p. 186. 

1.33. "Come, thou South." Song of Solomon iv. 6. 

Page 104. Ruskin's idea of helpfulness : " And whatever one's 
station in life may be, those of us who mean to fulfil our duty ought, 
first, to live on as little as we can ; and secondly to do all the whole- 
some work for it we can ; and spend all we can spare in doing all the 
sure good we can. 

' ' And sure good is first in feeding people, then in dressing people, 
then in lodging people, and lastly, in rightly pleasing people, with arts, 
or sciences, or any other subject of thought." — Preface to Sesame 
and Lilies, edition of 1871. 

Page 104. 1.9. " Darkness of the streets. " " The very light of 



132 NOTES. 

the morning sky, when there is any — which is seldom nowadays near 
London — has become hateful to me, because of the misery that I 
know of, and see signs of where I know it not, which no imagination 
can interpret too bitterly." — Fors Claviyera. 

1. 20. " Matilda." Note several things about this passage : 1st. Ma- 
tilda and Maud are the same name, in Latin and in English. Mr. 
Ruskin mingles Dante's and Tennyson's thoughts, so as to make a 
new thought, different from both. 2d. Matilda was, historically, 
Countess of Tuscany, and an active supporter of the power of the 
church against the empire. She lived about two hundred years before 
Dante. In the Purgatorio (XXVIII. 1-145), she is Dante's guide 
through the Terrestrial Paradise. He sees her walking by the river 
Lethe, wreathing flowers and singing as she goes ; he addresses her, 
and she tells him many things about that mysterious life after death, 
and helps him on his journey. It is plain that the thought of her, 
to Ru.skin, means Helpfulness. 3d. " Happy Lethe " {Purgatorio, 
XXVIII. 127) is the river whose waters when tasted take away the 
memory of past sins. 4th. The sentence, even with explanations, 
must be studied carefully, that the fulness of its beautiful meaning 
may be understood. 

1. 23. " Come into the garden." Maud, xxii. 1. 

1. 33. " The Larkspur," etc. Maud, xxii. 10. 

Page 105. 1. 10. "Madeleine." Mary Magdalene, John xx. 15. 
Madeleine is the French and Magdalene the Hebrew name, of which 
Maud is diminutive. 

1. 15. " Fiery sword." Genesis iii. 24. 

1. 16. " This garden." The vineyard of the Lord of Hosts. Isaiah 
V. 7. "The angel of the Lord stood in a path of the vineyards." 
Numbers xxii. 24. 

1. 17. " Fruits of the valley." Song of Solomon vi. 17. 

1. 18. "Vine flourished," etc. Song of Solomon vi. 11. 

1. 22. " Sanguine seed." The blood-red pomegranate seed. Song 
of Solomon vi. 12. 

1. 2.3. " Angel keepers." Song of Solomon i. 6. " Hungry birds." 
Isaiah xlvi. 11. Also Ezekiel xxxix. 4. 

1. 25. " Take us the foxes." Song of Solomon ii. 15. 

1.29. "Foxes have holes." Matthew viii. 20. 

1. 30. " Stones cry out." Luke xix. 40. 

1. 31. " Son of Man can lay His head." Matthew viii. 20. 

The involved and passionate .style of the last paragraph finds some 
explanation in Modern Painters, Vol. IV. Chap. XII. § 8. 



NOTES. 133 

"However great a man may be, there are always some subjects 
which ought to throw him off his balance ; some by which his poor 
human capacity of tliought should be conquered and brought into the 
inaccurate and vague state of perception, so that the language of the 
highest inspiration becomes broken, obscure, and wild in metaphor, 
resembling that of the weaker man, overborne by weaker things.'' 



A FEW EXERCISES. 

Page 22. " Irrigation." How is the figure appropriate ? 

Pages 34-35. Express in your own words the meaning of this 
paragraph. In what sense is the word of God being " offered to us 
daily " ? 

Page 37. What does flashy mean to you ? Tell the gist of the 
passage quoted fmni Milton. Who was "the grim wolf" ? 

Page 42. What is the attitude of mind with which the author 
thinks we should study great literature ? 

Page 45. Explain the author's use of the word "passion." 

Page 52. " Re.solve aoother nebula" means what? 

Page 67. Give the author's ideas about war. See Notes, p. 120. 

Page 55. Give his ideas about railways. 

Page 55. What is the author's purpose in printing the clipping 
from the Daily Telegraph in a lecture on Books ? Make the con- 
nection. 

Page 63. Comment on the author's use of the word "folded." 
What does it show about his ways of seeing and thinking ? What is 
the " city of sleeping kings " ? 

Page 65. Explain the author's idea of true kingship. 

Page 69. Give the substance of the note to § 30, without the 
bitter tone. 

Page 72. Why do you think the author chose the Septuagint ver- 
sion instead of the familiar one ? 

Page 84. Explain the author's idea of a perfect home. 

Page 85. What is meant by " the true changefulness of woman " ? 
Do you think the author's tone has anything of "flowery condescen- 
sion" in these pages ? 

Page 91. How may novel reading be injurious ? 

Page 95. What did Joan owe to the forests of Domr^my ? 

Page 96. Wao or what, is the "Christian Minerva" ? 



134 NOTES. 

Page 99. Is desire of power a good thing ? 

Page 102. What picture do you see here ? What does it show 
you about the author's way of thinking and expressing himself ? 

Page 104. What or who are the "feeble florets" ? The "banks 
of wild violet " ? What is the author trying to persuade you to do ? 

Page 104. What is Ruskin's idea of true helpfulness ? See Notes, 
p. 131. 

Explain the meaning of the title to the lectures. 

These lectures were written for oral delivery. Do you think that 
fact has affected the style of them ? If so, how ? In regard to tone ? 
Sentences ? Choice of words ? Allusions ? 



INDEX TO NOTES. 



A countenance, 129. 

Accuracy, 110, 127. 

Advance in life, 123. 

iEschylus, .see Homer. 

Alcestis, 128. 

Amusements, 123. 

Angel keepers, 132. , 

Angels desire, the, 116. 

Angels of Conduct, Toil, and 

Thought, 12.5. 
Aratra Pentelici, quoted, 111, 118, 

128. 
Architecture, see Art. 
Arrows of the Chace, quoted, 108, 

115, ll(i, 121. 
Art, natural love of, 121. 
Art, Ruskin's views on, 108, 109. 
Athena, 125. 
Austrian guns, 120. 

Bayoneting young girls, 118. 

Beatrice, 128. 

Bishops, duties of, 112, 113. 

Bishops, scene with the, 115. 

Books, right use of, 114. 

Books, Southey's love of, 118, 119. 

Bread, motto, 119. 

British Museum, 119. 

Caiaphas, 115. 

Caina, 124. 

Canaille, 110. 

Cancan, 123. 

Cantel, 124. 

Cathedrals ruined by war, see 

Stables. 
Chalmers, 123. 
Chamaeleon, 110. 
Christ Church, 130. 



Chrysolite, one entire, etc., 131. 
Clarens, 122. 
Climb into the fold, 111. 
Cloudy shield, 128. 
Collingwood, quoted, see Spirit. 
Come into the garden, 132. 
Command, 129. 
Competition, 119. 
Cook, E. T., quoted, 131. 
Corn Laws. 119, 126. 
Cotton, price of, 117. 
Coxcomb, 127. 

Croivn of Wild Olive, quoted, 117, 
120, 124, 129. 

Daily Telegraph, The Sheffield, 122. 

Dante, 113, 115, 128. 

Dead lady, 128. 

Dead, the, 109, 116. 

Death of the poor, 123. 

Bei gratia, 131. 

Delphi, 125. 

Desolate and oppressed, 130. 

Desolate, pleasant places, 130. 

Dio, 123. 

Do and teach, 125. 

Ecclesia, 111. 
Ecclesiastical Courts, 116. 
Ecclesiastical power. 111, 116. 
Education, 114, 115, 126, 130 (n. under. 

90). 
Egyptian Spirit of Wisdom, 128. 
Elysian gates, 109. 
Ensamples, 112. 
Episcopal, 112. 
Even the light harebell, 131. 

Fallow ground, 116. 
False Latin quantity, 110. 

135 



136 



INDEX TO NOTES. 



Faubourg St. Germain, 109. 

Fiery sword, 132. 

Firiug cannon, 122. 

Flashy, 122. 

Folded, 123. 

Form for the Power, see Letter and 

Spirit. 
Fors Clavigera, quoted, 132. 
Fossils of Solenhofen, 119. 
Foxes, take us the, 132, 133. 
Fruits of the valley, 132. 

Go, and he goeth, 125. 
Good Samaritan, 118. 
Grim wolf, 112. 

Hades, 123. 

Helpfulness, 131. 

Her feet have touched the meadows, 

131. 
Homer, 124. 
Household Gods, 129. 
Hungry birds, 132. 

H gran riflvto, 124. 
Isabella, 127. 

Jewel could not equal, 125. 
Judgment-throne, 130. 
Julia, 127. 

Key of knowledge, 113. 

Keys, 111. 

King of men , 125. 

Kings, 124. 

Kings, Robber, 125. 

La donna e mobile, 129. 

Last infirmity, 107. 

Lawgiver, 128. 

Lazarus, 123. 

Letter and Spirit, 110, 111. 

Letters, quoted, 116, 117. 

Likeness of a kingly crown, 127. 

List, 111. 

Ludgate, 119. 

Lycidas, 111. 

Madeleine, 132. 
Matilda, 132. 



Maud, 132. 
Milton, 111, 112. 
Minerva, 130. 
Mitred, 112. 

Modern Painters, quoted, 133. 
Money, 118. 
Mortal, 107. 
Moth and rust, 125. 
Mouths, 111. 
Miiller, Max, 111. 
Munera Piilveris, quoted, 110, 118. 
Muses, 130. 
My Lord. 107. 

Mijstery of Life and its Arts, quoted, 
130. 

National rifle grounds, 125. 
Nobility of mind, 109. 
No'rton, quoted, see Dante. 

Observatory, 119. 
Opium, 117, 118. 
Owen, Sir Richard, 119. 

Passion, 116. 

Path, 125. 

Peace, 126, 128, 129. 

Peace, Prince of, 131. 

People-eating, 124. 

Perplex'd i' the extreme, 118. 

Pilot, 111. 

Pipes of straw, 112. 

Political Economy, Ruskin's works 

on, 108. 
Pollution, 131. 
Pope Nicholas HI., 115. 
Potable gold, 125. 
Power, 124. 

Power of the royal hand, 131. 
Prmterita, quoted, 122, 124, 129, 131. 
Preface to edition of 1871, quoted, 

1.32. 
Pre-Raphaelites, 128. 
Presbyter, 111. 

Qveen of the Air, quoted, 108, 109, 
110, 125. 

Railways, 121. 
Rank mist, 112. 



INDEX TO NOTES. 



137 



Recks, 111. 

Keticence, cruel, 109, 110. 
Rex, 131. 
Rock-apostle, 113. 
Root of all evil, 118. 
Rossettl, 128. 

Salisbury cathedral, 112, 

Saudbags, 120. 

Satauella, 123. 

Scene with the bishops, see Bishops. 

Sfhaffhausen, 121. 

Schools, 107. 

Scorpion whips, 118. 

Scott, 124, 128. 

Scrannel, 112. 

Scythians, 124. 

Seed, 132. 

Sensation, 116. 

Septuagint, 127. 

Sesame, 107. 

Sharp arrows, 130. 

Sheep having no shepherd, 130. 

Shop, 119. 

Son of Man, 133. 

Sped, 111. 

Spirit, breath, 113. 

Spirit of the Comforter, 1.30. 

St. Francis and St. Dominic, 115. 

St. George, creed of the Guild of, 114. 

Stables of French cathedrals, 121. 

Stones cry out, 133. 

Stones of Venice, quoted, 109. 

Stones, penalty of, 122. 

Streets, 131. 

Streets, darkness of, 132. 



Struggle oi kingly and ecclesiastical 

powers, 111, 116. 
Summary of Kings' Treasuries, 127. 

Take him and bind him, 114. 

Tell's chapel, 122. 

Ten millions of consternation, 126. 

The only book, 126. 

Time and Tide, quoted, 122, 123, 126, 

127. 
Tissue, 125. 

Towers of the vineyards, 122. 
Translated boots, 122, " note." 
Trinity College, 130. 
Turner drawings, 123. 
Two Paths, The, quoted, 108. 

Unknown God, 127. 

Unlessoned girl, 127. 

Unto this Last, quoted, 108, 119, 126. 

Valley of Humiliation, 129. 
Variable as the shade, 129. 
Vine, 132. 
Virgil, 11.5. 
Visitors' bell, 107. 
Vulcan, 125. 

Waldstein, quoted, see Railways. 

War, 120, 126, 128. 

Watereth. he that, 113. 

Wind bloweth, 113. 

Winged, 125. 

Wordsworth, 129. 

Worthy bidden guest. 111. 



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